el ae 1 a x ae * rs beet: bs Se . i} ae S . = oes ‘* Hy + - oa 4 6 
rs s 6ENESeors 4 - "f “vt 4 
rsgsisedeeeees beset ibincsa sy eigaererrirecoeesseeten : patpocseseseree meseecseceaelts: Sugicecssteuessesecoes ie Hatt ate t atari | ‘ ereeey + chper pest 
14 Kh eo riasteeccossaese : geeecueyeers: Sracarneesiecoeeeterce pastece ss 4 eceseuecerrersrerverien Beate : 
BEdbes ‘ t Meee eeeeene : f 3 Ori 0 bats bhetencs - ES learersrenteee 
4 4 4 


eeey Sareuer ee b hee a" 8 AOE Hee mor wor 
bead he ~ is 4 J 0 
= 


BO Re eE EIR S Wawa we 
sereeueedraeersn a 
Beheeonras ae: 
smdadeseres 


= 
eats 
= 
a AE TM: 
rob eediewin ba: 
eareek 


shepeusepeouc 


re bin ieaey 


cs at 
Fee ee sures 


Sree 


ht 
a i ft ee 2 
Bese an shtedet mosees Hes 
etzes 


e srevegeuses Te 
f : : 
\.$ x) 
4 


a 


gecees see se shesseorns: 
+H ptrtes tet yt y 
peters 
he th-4- 


° seca 
Sanity 
COveRe wasnAade 


. ttt 
pee fi 


Hterinteietietertint se Iedtarenseneateres apeScces eth caee oe! 
peneneees : neepetianes eety SAK ee eee m 33 eres S ars ee a he ahaa me 


cee 
rt 
ts 


peg chenpedne 
Me epoe dene 


St 


: oeaesess 
stotwtcsesissserseise oes Sroot testscnea np sssesssesesasbsnesanienssinasasesass geasesesteasite 


¢ 


voe 
bey 
+ 


tt. 


see 








ay UF PRIN 
<a “EP 
ig OCT 8 1932 
y e 
SOLUBICAL SEWN 






Section ¢ 





ara A 
CNR 


Ay 
hy 


iy, my 
fibicaen TA ue? Lape eld) pee SM 
by t ' , '* Ni Pa tg 


° t 
iN 
1 
L'a) 
’ 


eee 


oats ] 
y mae pee 


Aho tas 


Nay ih 
ie 









4 


s RU aie ie ay is ‘ ' 


Hah Po eon a al 7 4 # yi Ml Way “y d y ze 
Bs <3 ciel ARs wet vs ~ 

} My) ie 
ve Gi ny : {i \. ‘ , mm, ? re 


« i 4 a 
$ in me es Bos oe . 3 rs esi es 





eh 
in 2022 with funding from ! a) | 


aii 


f in Digitized by the Internet Archive 





: \ ‘ya ; > ive 4 ’ oi 4 
i : if : Dp i ' 7 a bo a’ a! ; 
9 i fi “a 2 : v1 é f Aw A nm aT a 
ie eh a ae hy ; - \ : ‘4 
Wata% P, j cs a J i La 
eT he Py g Pike 2 ed Ss 
f ope i Spe IAP wtb ee i ¢ ; DL The [pe TAGs 1 Ce $e) 
he PY ds i‘ Ae y t f } Vi a ACR: 7 )) Ted oP: : 
; abe Ay : ry tg i a] : } J ve rl fs : “4 7 ; 
eer ed 2 55 OR) Te ee a YP A e irk Gi v5 (2) 4 28 ae jy 
r ae . 7 
CF 
7: =i: $55 . . ———— ae f 
> J ‘ n 
ew Fi r o) 4 rill 


ST. PAUL’S LIFE OF CHRIST 


ii 
| f 
A Pfal 


ida 4 


‘ 





See AWW Sl 
OF CHRIST 





BY / 


GWILYM O. GRIFFITH” 


NEW ay YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RicHarD CLay & Sons, LIMITED, 
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. 


Lhe 


Trt. 


IV. 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTORY . 


1. IN WHAT MANNER Paut’s LIFE OF CHRIST 
WAS WRITTEN ; 5 


2. THE STRANGE PROLOGUE WRITTEN UPON THE 
HEART OF SAUL. 


3. PRESUPPOSITIONS 
PAUL/S-LIFE OF, CHRIST IN REVIEW. 


CHRIST BEFORE THE AGES . 


I. THE PAULINE OUTLOOK. 
2. PAUL AND THE MODERN MIND 


CHRIST IN CREATION AND IN MAN 


I. THE Cosmic PAssIoNn : 2 f : 
2. CHRIST IN THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE 
RACE. 


CHRIST INCARNATE . 


INTRODUCTORY.—‘‘ According to my gospel”’ 
“In fashion as aman” 

HUMBLED 

OBEDIENT 

TEMPTED 


“The words of the Lord Jesus” 
“* They knew Him not”’ 
“* Seen of Angels ”’ 


THE LorpD’s SUPPER 


OS een Scere an 


Vii 


PAGE 


IOI 
108 
III 
cai 
Tot 
129 


Vill Contents 


10. THE GooD CONFESSION BEFORE PILATE 
Ir. CRUCIFIED 
12. Buriep . 


VI. CHRIST RISEN AND EXALTED 
INTRODUCTORY.—‘‘ At mid-day, O King’ 
“* Raised on the third day”’ 


, 


‘* He was seen”’ . 

‘* Received up in glory”’ . 

THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST . ‘ 
THE Lire or CurRist IN His CHURCH 
** The blessed hope’? 


I ARKRowvn 


VII. THE LIVING CHRIST AND THE DOCTRINES 
OF GRACE 

INTRODUCTORY.—‘‘ We know in part”’ 

THE DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY 

LAW AND GRACE ; 

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH 

THE GIFT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 


Aber e 


VILL, THE. CHRIST BEYOND "THE “AGES 


ANNOTATIONS 


THE JERUSALEM WHICH IS ABOVE 
PAUL AS GoOD’s PATRIOT . 
THE SAINTS TO JUDGE THE WORLD 


PAGE 
134 
138 
149 


153 
153 
163 
166 
169 
172 
177 
183 


192 
192 
202 
212 
222 
236 


248 


257 
265 
276 


I 
INTRODUCTORY 


1. IN WHAT MANNER Paut’s Lire oF CHRIST WAS 
WRITTEN. 


“¢Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to 
draw up a narrative concerning those things 
which are most surely believed among us, even 
as they delivered them unto us, which from the 
beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of 
the Word, it seemed good to me also, having 
traced the course of all things accurately from the 
first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent 
Theophilus, that thou mightest know the cer- 
tainty concerning the things wherein thou wast 
instructed.” 


So wrote Paul’s beloved physician. And Paul 
himself, having previously counselled Timothy 
respecting “‘ the sound words, even the words of 
our Lord Jesus Christ ” (1 Tim. vi. 3) is reputed 
to have added: ‘‘ Hold the pattern ”—or out- 
line— of the sound teaching which thou hast 
heard from me in the faith and love of Christ 


IO St. Pauls Life of Christ 


Jesus ” (2 Tim. 1. 13); which teaching he refers 
to as ‘‘ my gospel ” (2 Tim. ii. 8) and epitomizes— 


He . . . was manifest in the flesh 
vindicated by the Spirit, 
seen by the angels, 
preached among the nations, 
believed on throughout the world, 
taken up to glory. 
(1 Tim. 11.16. Moffatt.) 


As for Luke, it may be that he took up his 
task not without some urging from Paul himself 
in his later years, and not without recourse, also, 
to Paul’s own invaluable books and parchments. 
And as for Paul, was he himself in those later 
years, and seeing that the Lord tarried, never 
urged by Luke and by Timothy and by believing 
men of like insight and sympathy, to fill in his 
own outline of sound teaching concerning the 
Lord of Glory? For Paul’s treatise would 
clearly have been different from any treatise 
which any other Evangelist, or they who were 
apostles before him, could ever have attempted. 
Paul’s Life of Christ, so wide-horizoned, so 
mystical, so discursive, and withal so self-revealing 
and autobiographical, must have been different 
from all Lives of Christ that ever have been or 
ever will be written. 

We must of course admit that if ever he had 


Introductory II 


it in mind to leave such a treatise in the hands 
of Timothy and of Luke and of the Gentile 
churches generally, we have no trace or tradition 
of it. And what would not we give to have it 
otherwise? Or even to come upon that lost 
Antiochan manual of the Sayings and Acts of 
the Master from which, as we may believe, Paul 
quoted on the beach at Miletus, and which he 
always packed, with his other precious books and 
papers, in his travellers’ kit? 

But if Paul has left us no Life of Christ as such, 
he has left us fruitful suggestions for such a Life. 
All through his epistles and reported discourses 
he throws out hints and sketches and synopses 
of it, and when we put them together we have, 
not indeed a collection of biographic detail, 
but nevertheless a general outline of Paul’s own 
conception of Christ’s life in time and in eternity. 

We can say more. Paul’s Life of Christ was 
ever before him and was fundamental to all 
he ever wrote or uttered. He carried that Life 
with him wherever he went. He and his Life of 
Christ were inseparable. His books and parch- 
ments he might leave behind, but not that Life. 
Moreover, it was continually being enlarged and 
annotated and in some respects revised; every 
day something was being added to it; it was 
always growing; it was never finished. We may, 


12 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


perhaps, follow the whim of Synoptic scholars 
and call it *“‘Q”—the Pauline **Q’” which we 
are forced to hypothecate, which we can trace 
everywhere, though we can discover it nowhere. 

All this we may confidently affirm. For 
Paul’s original and fundamental Life of Christ 
was written, not with ink, but with the Spirit 
of the living God; not on parchment, but on 
the tablets of Paul’s own heart and mind. And 
then, because Paul in his discourses and his 
epistles was always drawing upon it and transcrib- 
ing it, here a little and there a little, with spaces 
between to invite a reverent imagination, it is 
possible for us to attempt the task which has 
given their title to these chapters. 

But first we must consider, not the Life of 
Christ written on Paul’s heart, but the strange 
Prologue written on the heart of Saul of ‘Tarsus. 


2. THe STRANGE PROLOGUE WRITTEN UPON THE 
HEART OF SAUL. 


Before ever the Gospel of God could be written 
upon the heart of Paul, something had to be 
written on the heart of Saul of ‘Tarsus—a Prologue 
so strange that Saul himself could find no satis- 
fying clue to it until the greater work to which 
it was an introduction had already been begun 


Introductory 13 


within him. But afterward, indeed, he turned 
again and again to that Prologue with new and 
understanding eyes. It became more and more 
clear to him that the same hand, now recording 
within him the Life of the Son of God, had 
already in those earlier days, even from his birth 
and before it, been busy upon him. 

For first of all his human heart itself had to be 
fashioned and prepared. As the papyrus tablet, 
before ever it was ready for the pen of the scribe, 
had first to be fashioned out of the flesh of 
selected reeds and interwoven, strand upon strand, 
and compacted and made smooth, so into the 
preparation of the fleshy tablet of Paul’s own 
heart had gone even the very selection of his 
forebears and all the discipline of the Tarsus 
years and of his upbringing in Jerusalem. “It 
pleased God,” says Paul in after days, ‘‘ who set 
me apart from my mother’s womb...” and 
again: “I thank God, whom I serve from my 
forefathers. ...”> What he could plainly see 
was that his setting apart at his birth, and his 
later setting apart at his conversion, and his still 
later setting apart at Antioch, were all of them 
traceable to the original, effectual calling and 
setting apart by God Himself; and that vocation, 
predestinative and preparative, represented a 
purpose which, flowing through all Paul’s ancestry, 


14 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


from Benjamin and before him, had its rise 
before time itself, in God’s eternity. 


But to come to the actual Prologue written 
upon Saul’s heart: we have first to consider 
that portion of it which was written while he 
still spake as a child and understood as a child 
and thought as a child, there in his home in 
Tarsus. Concerning this we are put in mind 
of the picture drawn, it seems by Paul himself, 
of the happy childhood of his own son in the 
faith, of Eunice, Timothy’s mother, and of his 
grandmother Lois, and how from infancy young 
Timothy had been instructed in the Holy Scrip- 
tures. For Saul, too, we may believe, had known 
a like happy childhood, and had been instructed 
in those same Scriptures which were able to make 
him wise unto that salvation yet to be revealed. 

And we are by no means to slur over what he 
thought as a child and understood as a child. A 
child’s thoughts and a child’s understanding do 
often, as we know, put older and, forsooth, sager 
heads to confusion; and it may have been that 
there was a somewhat in young Saul’s thoughts 
and understanding in those early years in ‘Tarsus 
which continually rebuked and put to confusion 
much that passed for seasoned wisdom in the 
troubled mind of Saul of Jerusalem. We have 


Introductory 15 


to reckon with that possibility. And of this we 
may be sure: if the clock of history had chimed 
the great hour earlier than it did, and if Jesus 
had been a teacher in Tarsus when actually He 
was still a child in Nazareth, He would have said, 
‘“‘ Suffer little Saul to come unto Me, and forbid 
him not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” 

So, too, we have to remember that whatever 
may have been the disparity, and even the con- 
trast, between young Saul’s thoughts in Tarsus 
and his later and not always wiser thoughts in 
Jerusalem, yet when he thought as a child and 
understood as a child, he did so as the child who 
was father to the man he ultimately became. 
It is indeed almost to be regretted that Saul in 
his later years took upon him the name of Paul. 
Saul he was before his conversion and illumination, 
and Saul he remained long years afterward ; 
nevertheless, we have come to use the two names 
as distinguishing so sharply and absolutely between 
Saul the persecutor and Paul the Christian 
apostle that they appear as two persons without 
any underlying continuity. Yet all of Paul’s 
natural vehemence and impetuosity, all his 
eagerness of mind, all his passion for wide horizons 
and his instinct for universal truth—all these 
things were potential in young Saul; and we 
may believe that even before he left Tarsus they 


16 St. Paul's Life of Christ 
had, so to say, broken through the shell and begun 


to feel a tremor in their wings. His moral 
qualities were there, also, awaiting development— 
his pride of purpose, his courage, his capacity for 
heroic love, a heart “‘ overflowing with, and greedy 
of, affection.” Moreover, if we rightly colour 
the contrast between Saul and Paul, we shall 
do well to remember that even before his con- 
version there was a contrast and a conflict between 
Saul and Saul. 

So Saul, being such a child as he was, was 
instructed out of the Law and the Prophets in 
his home in Tarsus, and was set apart for the 
high calling of a rabbi in Israel, and in that 
atmosphere of unfeigned faith he grew in wisdom 
and stature and waxed strong in spirit. And as 
childhood passed into youth, were there never 
vouchsafed to him mystic intimations and pre- 
sentiments of destiny? In his deepening study 
of the Scriptures, did never a ray of new light, 
as of promise or prophecy, break out upon him 
from God’s Holy Word? 

“The thought came to me,” says Mazzini 
of his own boyhood days in Genoa, “that we 
Italians could, and therefore ought to, struggle 
for the liberty of our country.” The thought— 
no more, he would have us understand, than “a 
confused idea’”—‘‘came to him,” it seems, 


Introductory 17 


“one Sunday in April,” while he was walking 
in the Strada Nuova with his mother. That 
day there “ came to him,” also,—*‘ flashing before 
his mind ’”’—the thought that he was destined 
to play a part in that coming struggle. And 
presently, boy as he was, there came to him such 
great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart 
for Italy unredeemed, that he was fain to garb 
himself in black as one mourning for the dead. 
Also there came to him a vehement hunger and 
thirst of the soul for some new and living word 
of God, some death-challenging, resurrecting, 
redeeming word which should ransom his country 
from the grave. How came these things to this 
future apostle of Italy and of the New Europe? 
Through some chance word, it would appear, 
read or overheard, through a look of nameless 
suffering in the eyes of a fugitive patriot, through 
hearing the word Jzalia fall like sad, caressing 
music from patriot lips. All these things came 
to Mazzini before his decisive and regenerative 
illumination, and while he was still a boy in 
Genoa. And notwithstanding all grave and vital 
differences, it may be that this early experience 
of a spirit so clear, so apostolic and in some 
respects so Pauline, is a fair telescope through 
which we may look back upon the hidden years 
of the boy of Tarsus. 
B 


18 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


And then there was Tarsus itself. Tarsus 
itself was written in that strange Prologue in 
the heart of Saul. ‘Tarsus, as Paul was wont to 
say, was ‘“‘no mean city.”’ Cities there have been, 
and cities there are still, which have some cause 
to be known as ‘‘ mean,”’ even in a sense other 
than that of apostolic usage; but ‘Tarsus was not 
one of them. ‘Tarsus was not only a cosmo- 
politan but, what is more, a magnanimous and 
liberal-minded city; so that between the Jews 
of that city and their Gentile neighbours there 
was freer commerce of mind and heart than was 
commonly to be found. And this, also, in the 
fulness of time, was to fall out unto the further- 
ance of the Gospel and Paul’s own fuller salva- 
tion and apostleship. For if it was “by the 
good providence of God” that Carlyle, as he 
has told us, learned German, it was far more 
clearly by the same good providence that young 
Saul not only learned Greek, but—using the term 
in its largest sense—dwelt among the Greeks and 
became their debtor. For in Tarsus, by the 
providence of God, young Saul obtained a know- 
ledge of, and a certain insight into, something 
of the wisdom and the folly, the light and the 
darkness, of the Hellenic and Roman world. 
And this we can affirm without painting a vain 
picture of a too precocious genius at work upon 


Introductory 19 


bookish lore, or exaggerating Saul’s Hellenism 
as if it out-coloured his Hebraism, which pre- 
sumably it never did. 

Tarsus was Saul’s book; and he read it, as 
children do, by its pictures. Children learn 
nervously, and as it were by eye-flashes, by 
mystic affinities and occult disgusts; and youth 
learns by the urgings of a new and undefined 
curiosity which throbs in the blood and in the 
brain. In this way young Saul was always 
learning as he walked the streets of ‘Tarsus. 
Did never the lad look into the eyes of a Gentile 
youth to feel, for a swift, eternal moment of | 
insight, that there, also, in that Pagan body, 
dwelt a human soul much like his own, needing, 
too, it might be, some fuller, diviner Word than 
had ever yet been published to mankind? Out 
of the darkness of that Pagan city did never 
something of “the Light that lighteth every 
man’ surprisingly shine forth? Was never in 
Saul’s Tarsus some unproselyted Gentile who, 
by his patient continuance in well-doing, put 
to shame God’s own elect? And amid all the 
enlightenment of Tiarsian Jewry was there no 
dimness and vexation, no shadow of sinister things, 
which for quite other reasons put the elect to 
shame? If so, we may believe that in one Jewish 
home there were searchings of heart which later, 


20 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


long after, were to burst forth into that flaming 
PF Accuse: 


Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest upon the 
Law, and makest thy boast of God, and knowest His will, 
and approvest the things that are excellent, being 
instructed out of the Law, and art confident that thou 
thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which 
are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of 
babes, having in the Law the form of knowledge and of 
the truth. Thou therefore that teachest another, 
teachest thou not thyself? Thou that preachest a 
man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that 
sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou 
commit adultery? ‘Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou 
rob temples? ‘Thou who gloriest in the Law, through 
thy transgression of the Law dishonourest thou God? 
For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles 
because of you, even as it is written. 


But we may be sure that all these things 
together would serve only to fling Saul back 
the more vehemently upon the Law and the 
Prophets. All the light-beams which here and 
there shot forth surprisingly from the gross 
darkness of the Pagan world, and all the clearer 
light which revealed and rebuked the darknesss 
which lay upon his own Jewish world, would 
communicate to him a challenge to hold not less 
firmly, but, rather, the more resolutely, to his 
Hebrew faith. The ways of genius are hid from 
our eyes, not least of all the ways of religious 


Introductory 21 


genius; but we may hardly believe that no pre-: 
sentiment of leadership ever touched the soul 
of Saul. If, even before his illumination, Mazzini 
—to refer once more to our modern apostle— 
could dream his dreams of Young Italy and a 
universal faith, shall we believe that this destined 
prophet and apostle of the ancient world had, 
according to the forms and instruments of his 
own times, no dreams of Young Israel and the 
“restoration of all things”? Mazzini had 
Dante to fire his faith and fashion his dreams, 
but then Saul had Isaiah; Mazzini had Rome, 
but then Saul had Zion. And the more Saul 
studied the Prophets and felt also the deep 
challenge of the world around him, the clearer 
it must have appeared to him that from Zion, 
from Jerusalem, must proceed both judgment 
and salvation for all the earth. In Jerusalem all 
history became significant and luminous; upon 
her, though all unknowing, the world waited for 
the word of authority and power; compared 
to her, all other cities were as Hagar to Sarah, 
as bondslaves to the queen-mother. Yes; for 
not Dante himself, nor Alfieri, nor Foscolo, nor 
Manzoni could have sung of the love of Italy 
and of Rome as Isaiah and Micah and Zechariah 
and all the sweet singers of Hebrew psalmody 
sang the love of Zion into the soul of Saul. 


22 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on 
thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city.— 
Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the 
Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, darkness shall 
cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples; but the 
Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen 
upon thee. And nations shall come to thy light, and 
kings to the brightness of thy rising—And I will dwell 
in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called a 
City of Truth.—And_many nations shall come and say, 
Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, 
and to the House of the God of Jacob; and He will 
teach them of His ways, and we will walk in His paths : 
for the Lord shall go forth out of Zion, and the Word of 
the Lord from Jerusalem.—And My House shall be called 
an House of Prayer for all peoples.—For from the rising 
of the sun even unto the going down of the same My name 
shall be great among the Gentiles. 


All this, and much more besides, was written in 
that strange Prologue in Saul’s heart. Jerusalem 
(said Young Israel) should yet be free and glorious 
in the sight of all men, the mother-city of the 
world. 


But we may believe that not all that was 
written on Saul’s heart in Tarsus was comparable 
to what came to be written on his heart in Jeru- 
salem itself. Indeed, what was written on Saul’s 
heart in Jerusalem is perhaps comparable only 
to what came to be written on Luther’s heart in 
Rome—written, that is to say, in that other 


Introductory 23 


strange Prologue which the Gospel of the Refor- 
mation was presently to ratify and consummate. 

In ‘Tarsus Saul had been brought up on the 
Jerusalem of the Prophets and the Psalmists. 
But that City had never really come to earth; 
that City was still a Dream City, dwelling in 
the Unapparent—the Jerusalem that was above. 
The visible Jerusalem, gaudy and mean, with its 
quibblers and its cynics, its factions and its 
jealousies, its time-servers and its bigots—the 
visible Jerusalem was quite other than the Zion 
of the Prophets and the sweet singers of old. 

It is true that Saul was introduced to Jerusalem 
under auspices the most favourable. It was 
all in the nature of things that he should go to 
the liberal school of Gamaliel, and not to the 
straiter school of Shammai. ‘Tarsus had decided 
that for him in advance. Gamaliel’s devotion 
to the Law in its purity and spirituality, and the 
known fact that Gamaliel’s mind moved in a larger 
world than ecclesiastical Jewry—the known fact 
that Gamaliel was disposed to recognise that the 
Gentiles, who had not the Law, might yet show 
the work of the Law written in their hearts—all 
this made him a teacher after the heart of every 
liberal-minded citizen-Jew of ‘Tarsus, and of 
young Saul in particular. But not even Gamaliel 
was able to shield Saul from the shock of his 


24. (St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Jerusalem disillusionment. Had not the great 
Rabbi himself vexed his righteous soul unto 
weariness, and settled into a sad and patient 
prudentialism not at all to the mind and temper 
of any young dreamer of dreams? In any case, 
the great Rabbi was powerless to hold back young 
Saul from his bitter discovery. (And when did 
he first begin to discover that Ananias and his set 
were “ whited walls” ?) ‘* We lived in malice 
and envy” (so he wrote years later, tasting, it 
may have been, the bitter fruit of personal 
recollection), ‘‘ hateful, hating one another.” 

There were other things to trouble Saul at 
this time. ‘There was the Jordan revival under 
John. Whether John’s mission were from Heaven 
or of men, there could be no escaping the challenge 
of it, so that there went out unto him not simply 
all Judea, but even “all Jerusalem ” itself. 

But when John saw many of the Pharisees and 
Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said unto 
them, Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you 
to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth 
therefore fruit worthy of repentance: and think 
not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham 
to our father: for I say unto you that God is 
able of these stones to raise up children unto 
Abraham. And even now is the axe laid unto the 
root of the tree: every tree therefore that bringeth 


Introductory 25 


not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into 
the fire. And as the people were in expectation, 
and all men mused in their hearts concerning 
him, whether haply he were the Christ, John 
answered, saying unto them all: [ indeed baptize 
you with water unto repentance; but He who 
cometh after me is mightier than I: He shall 
baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. 

All this, too, had to be recorded in that strange 
Prologue slowly being written upon Saul’s heart. 
For not Gamaliel himself was able to set forth 
the spirituality and universality and exacting- 
ness of the Law of Moses and the Law of the 
heart as John set them forth for all who, like 
young Saul, had an ear to hear. 

Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to the Jordan 
unto John to be baptized of him. And after 
that John was put in prison Jesus began to preach 
the gospel of God, saying, The time is fulfilled, 
and the Kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, 
and believe in the gospel. 

Concerning this, and concerning the likelihood 
or unlikelihood of Saul’s ever having seen and 
heard his future Lord and Master in the flesh, 
what shall we say? Surely, that the likelihood is 
strong enough. But what passes beyond all 
likelihood into certainty is that Saul, whether 
he saw and heard Him or not, had to take know- 


26 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


ledge of Him and of His message, and of His 

controversies with Saul’s own party, and of His 
mighty words and deeds, not in Galilee only, 
but in Jerusalem itself. For there came a time 
when the Pharisees of Jerusalem said among 
themselves: ‘‘ Behold how ye prevail nothing: 
lo, the world is gone after Him!” and when the 
people said: ‘‘ John indeed did no miracle: but 
all things whatsoever John spake of this Man 
were true”’?; and when Caiaphas, being High 
Priest that same year, said: “It is expedient 
for you that one man should die for the people, 
and that the whole nation perish not ” (for thus 
he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation ; 
and not for the nation only, but that He might 
also gather together into one the children of 
God that were scattered abroad). And was it 
that Saul also consented unto His death? For 
they that dwelt in Jerusalem, and their rulers, 
because they knew Him not, nor the voices of the 
prophets which were read every sabbath, fulfilled 
them by condemning Him. And though they 
found no cause of death in Him, yet asked they 
of Pilate that He should be slain. And when 
they had fulfilled all things that were written 
of Him, they took Him down from the tree and 
laid Him in a tomb.—And this also had to be 


recorded in that strange Prologue in Saul’s heart. 


Introductory oes 


And after all this, when Saul was now fully 
entered upon his career as a rabbi, Jerusalem had 
by no means recovered from Jesus, from His life 
and from His death. As we know, it never did 
recover from Him. ‘There was, as it were, an 
Afterglow of Jesus, a light strange and portentous 
—fitful, sudden, elusive; and from that Afterglow 
or new, strange Light, it was not possible that 
Saul should completely escape. Here and there, 
also, in Saul’s own circle there would be some 
who were touched by the new doctrine and secretly 
inclined toward the new Way. Moreover, there 
were those sayings of Jesus, always so quotable, 
which would sometimes be cited, half in con- 
temptuous jest, in Saul’s hearing (“‘ As the mad 
Nazarene would say .. .”—‘‘ As the Galilean 
would put it .. .”’)—sayings about straining 
out gnats and swallowing camels, about the blind 
leading the blind, about washing cups clean—on 
the outside only, about tithing mint and forgetting 
GHOTILY 6347 

And then we may believe that that invisible 
pen, all the while busy upon Saul’s heart, pro- 
ceeded to record a passage more poignant and 
personal than any that had gone before. 


Of that shaft of Satan—that ‘‘ thorn ”—which 
once festered in Paul’s flesh, and since then has 


28 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


rankled in the minds of all Pauline commentators, 
we may choose to believe that it was something 
which belonged exclusively to his later years, 
something which came to vex and humiliate him 
as a Christian apostle. But even so, as to Paul’s 
flesh, was there any such difference between Saul 
and Paul as that no devil’s shaft may be thought 
of as ever having wounded him before his con- 
version? On the contrary, we know that young 
Saul was a mark alike for the arrows of Satan and 
the goads of God. Somehow, as we must 
believe, the Devil’s archers lay in wait for Saul 
even in Gamaliel’s school itself. ‘I was alive 
without the Law once,” says Paul in his great 
autobiographical chapter; ‘‘ but when the Com- 
mandment came home to me, Sin sprang up ”— 
and Saul fell, pierced with the venomed shaft. 
The more he learned from the lips of Gamaliel 
and, in spite of himself, from the thunderings of 
John and from such teachings as reached him 
from a quarter yet more authoritative—the more 
he learned from any quarter of the purity and 
spirituality and inwardness of the Law, the more 
conscious he became of his own stricken condition. 
There were vehement temptations which secretly 
shamed him; there were wounds which he was 
fain to hide even from his own eyes; and if ever 
he was in danger of being exalted above measure 


Introductory 29 


because, in his study of the Law and his zeal for 
the Law, he advanced in the Jews’ religion beyond 
many of his own age among his countrymen— 
if ever he was in such danger, those secret sores 
were there to humble him, and the Law itself 
was there to chafe and to inflame them: and not 
all his outward blamelessness nor his proud austeri- 
ties could put them out of the way. This, after all, 
was Saul’s sorest disillusionment in Jerusalem : 
his growing disillusionment concerning himself. 


The Epistles of Saul! What would not we 
give to have them alongside the Epistles of Paul! 
What would not we give to read Saul’s letters 
home from Jerusalem—his letters to his parents 
and to all his circlein Tarsus! What a contrastive 
study they would yield us! What vital allusions 
and parentheses! What outpourings of the 
heart! Not, it may be, without unmistakable 
evidences, here and there, that already the goads 
of God were beginning to be felt and winced at ! 
Not without hints, too, and fore-gleams of some- 
thing yet to come—fore-echoes of a music yet 
to be beaten out! (Could Saul ever have been 
quite so bitter against the new Way, so exceeding 
mad against its followers, if he had never in his 
own secret heart been perilously drawn toward a 
somewhat different mood ?) 


30 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


But gradually, as one is inclined to believe, a 
change was taking place which bade fair to end 
all hope of that Prologue ever leading to any 
gospel whatsoever in Saul’s troubled and darkened 
heart. 

The dreaming years of Tarsus were slowly 
being lost in the rank overgrowth of Saul’s later 
life in Jerusalem. Must he not take men as he 
found them, Jerusalem as it was? Must he not 
accommodate himself to facts? Must he not, 
as his admiring friends and his own restless heart 
were urging him to do, make his own career? 
Verily “‘ Nature with her everlasting snares and 
. . . devices, gives man youth, but takes the 
formed man for himself; she draws him on, 
entangles him in a web of social and family 
relations, three-fourths of which are independent 
of his will . . . he belongs to himself far less than 
in youth.” * 

There are no ordinary folk. Every man is 
extraordinary in his own eyes, caressing his secret 
thought. And Saul of Jerusalem, this destiny- 
haunted man with his inner dispeace, his psychic 
storms and convulsions, his restless intellect, his 
fierce pride, his disillusion, his devil’s shafts 
tormenting him—for him action, ambition, offered 
the alluring way of escape from the agony within. 


* Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, vol. i. chap. 3. 


Introductory aI 


Thus little by little, by urgings and flatteries 
and the zeal and fever of his own heart, Saul, we 
may take it, was drawn more and more into the 
ruling circle in Jewry. More and more their 
ways became his ways and their Scheme of 
Thorough his own. More and more, having 
chosen his medium and instrument, he became 
a Pharisee of the Pharisees, the implacable foe 
of all that challenged the ruling tradition. More 
and more, Saul the liberal thinker became the 
intolerant champion of the ancient way. 

Our most deliberate apostasies are apt to play 
the casuist with us, and we seldom confess to 
any break in the continuity of our highest pur- 
pose. Ambition is ventriloquial, throwing its 
voice, and calling us as if from the heights of 
aspiration. And had not Saul indeed come to 
Jerusalem for such a time as this? Was not the 
hour loudly calling for the authentic leader? 
The people were as sheep having no shepherd; 
the Jewish state was threatened alike by zealotry 
and cynicism, and must be saved from within; 
true, righteous authority must be revived. And 
this was no warrior’s mission now, nor task for 
some desert ascetic or popular “ messiah,”’ shun- 
ning the political instrument and crazed, it might 
be, by a popularity he could only disappoint. 
The less of these the better now! ‘These, it 


ae St. Paul's Life of Christ 


seemed, had had their chance, and had failed. 
What the hour called for—was it not for such 
aman as Saul? Saul as Hebrew of the Hebrews, 
Saul as Hellenist, Saul as Roman citizen, Saul as 
Pharisee—Providence had already strung all these 
keys, hanging them at his girdle. It was now for 
Saul to use them ! 

We understand that the world of action is 
always an alluring and perilous world for the 
man whose ambitions would dominate it. It 
has a hypnosis of its own. It is full of subtle 
suggestion. It lays invisible, potent fingers upon 
the chords of the heart, tightening here and 
relaxing there, until the entire scale and resonance 
of a man’s nature are imperceptibly altered. ‘The 
notation of his confessed purposes may remain 
the same, but their tone is different. Perhaps, 
for instance, it was not until Saul, fairly set 
upon his career, had been committed to certain 
regrettable necessities in the way of repressing 
undisciplined and heretical factions that he 
came fully to understand how utterly repugnant 
to him were the followers of the Way, and how 
the very name of Jesus of Nazareth was an offence 
and an exasperation. 

Withal there were the secret goads of God. 
For if it is strange how ambition can play the 
casuist, it is stranger still how within ourselves 


Introductory re 


there yet remains a self incorruptible which will 
in no wise be deceived, nor utterly and finally 
silenced. There was in Saul a certain malaise 
and low fever of the soul. Is it unreasonable to sup- 
pose that there were hours when those early Tarsus 
dreams called to him in the voice of rebuke ?— 
hours when it seemed as if at any moment some 
mystic door in the universe might open, some 
veil of occult memory be lifted, to his confusion ? 
(What if, after all, some new Word of God were 
being spelled out by these poor zealots of the Way ? 
What if in truth some divine secret were with 
them, unguessed by the Sanhedrin and the doctors 
of the Law?) 

And as if all this were not enough, there was 
Stephen—Stephen’s trial, and Stephen’s defence, 
and Stephen’s stoning, and Stephen’s prayer, and 
Stephen’s face lit up with the vision of Christ, 
and Stephen’s falling on sleep in the love of God. 
There were these things: until Saul’s whole 
being, save for that innermost, undissuadable, 
unrecognised self of his, rose up in yet more 
vehement wrath against this new Way and these 
most hateful Wayfarers, to breathe out threaten- 
ings and slaughter against them and the Name 
they named. And how should he have known 
that thus his unbelief was taking the wrathful 


road to faith? Not even Satan’s shaft itself 
Cc 


34 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


could have been so shaming and torturing now 
as the shaft that had been shot at him as by some 
invisible avenging archer from over the dead 
body of Stephen. 

And so in the ignorance of his unbelief and the 
ire of his tormented soul he must plunge yet 
more fiercely into activity and hie him to Damas- 
cus on that fateful journey wherein the strange 
Prologue was to be ended and the Life of Christ 
begun in Saul’s broken and wondering heart. 


3. PRESUPPOSITIONS. 


Concerning Paul’s Life of Christ there are 
certain presuppositions which we may do well 
to bear in mind. Of these the first is, that it 
was written, so to say, around one central chapter, 
and that chapter the revelation of Jesus Christ 
to Paul as the Lord of Glory at once exalted and 
persecuted. ‘That is to say, the first chapter 
in the order of Paul’s experience, and the central 
one in relation to his thought and faith, was that 
in which we find him smitten to the dust by One 
who stood on the luminous side of death, and who 
bore no weapons in His hands save His own 
wounds—wounds which, in a mystery, Paul 
himself had inflicted. 

We have also to remember that not the down- 


Introductory 35 


shining of that sudden and blinding glory, nor 
the sound of that Voice from the heart of it, nor 
the silence and the darkness and the trembling 
that followed, were anything more than the 
first broken sentences of that chapter. 

It was in the house of one Judas of Damascus, 
in the street called Straight, that those first 
halting lines were written over and expanded 
and expounded, beginning to take shape as the 
first—and what was to become the central— 
chapter of Paul’s Life of his Master. 

It seems that while Saul in the house of Judas 
was still in darkness and trembling and sore 
amazement, there came one knocking at the door. 
It seems, there came through the darkness the 
touch of human hands, the sound of a human 
voice: ‘“* Brother Saul, the Lord, even “fesus, 
hath sent me...” ; and with that human touch 
and that human voice there came something 
more—a strange warming and melting of the 
heart, a sweet and utter brokenness, joy and sorrow 
in one, as if Saul were a little child once more 
at his mother’s side—yea, a sweeter bliss than that, 
for he was in very truth a little child on the bosom 
of God. “ Brother Saul, the Lord, even ‘fesus, 
that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, 
hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight 
and be filled with the Holy Ghost.” 


ee 


36 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


It was this new-found joy in God, continually 
renewed, this sense of reconciliation, of being 
drawn into new and gracious spiritual intimacies, 
this sense of the forming within him of a new, 
humbling, exalting, destructive-creative Word 
greater than all his conceiving, and the opening 
out before him of a new life, a new mission, 
diviner than all his dreams—it was this, we must 
believe, which interpreted and confirmed to 
him the mighty happening on the Damascus road. 
Isolated, that single event could have done but 
little; and as evidence it must presently have 
evaporated. Paul must soon have come to doubt 
the validity of an experience to which he could 
not return, and which remained unrelated to 
any experience of normal value and significance. 
But the new sense of spiritual reality which had 
come to him in the house of Judas of Damascus 
was continuous; it was an inner apocalypse, 
lifting veil after veil within Paul’s own heart; 
it was relating him in new ways to the spiritual 
world and to the visible world also; it was daily 
communicating to him conceptions which had 
yet to be thought out, feelings which had yet 
to be interpreted; it was challenging him with 
the sense of a mission and destiny, a call to service 
and sacrifice, which, great beyond all his dreams, 
were yet the divine Amen to all the sacred 


Introductory ay 


presentiments and aspirations of his truest self. 
This it was, which confirmed for him the vision 
of the Damascus road. It had come in direct 
sequence to that vision, and was its unfoldment. 
And by the testimony of the Voice itself which 
had called to him from out the excellent glory, 
confirmed by the witness of Ananias and by each 
successive initiation in the new, divine life, it 
had all come through Jesus of Nazareth crucified 
and exalted. He it was who had shone upon him 
from the light unapproachable which was His 
dwelling, and who had avenged Himself of all 
Saul’s persecution by pouring into Saul’s heart 
the light and life and love of God. 

Long years afterward Paul could sum it all up 
as an epiphany of God’s kindness and love toward 
mankind bestowed through Jesus Christ and the 
renewing of the Divine Spirit. It was something 
that had “dawned upon him”; Jesus Christ 
Himself had dawned upon him; and the fact 
of the sunrise found its continuous confirmation 
in the ever-broadening day. 


Thus we have to bear in mind that Paul’s 
Life of Christ and Paul’s own life developed 
together. 

First of all, Paul had to acquaint himself with, 
and acclimatise his mind to, the Fact of Christ 


38 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


itself. How should he think of Him? ‘“ Who 
art Thou, Lord ?”’—that first question which 
escaped his lips as he lay in the dust of the Damas- 
cus road—that question was never completely 
answered. It is not completely answered to-day. 
Is it not the question which each successive age 
must raise anew? “J am ‘fesus whom thou per- 
secutest”? was as complete an answer as Saul 
could bear that day. ‘‘ The Just One” was the 
name Ananias added three days later—‘‘ the 
Righteous One.” Saul had heard Stephen use 
it. It was a favourite title for Jesus with the 
followers of the Way. Jesus the Just One, then, 
crucified and exalted, exalted and persecuted— 
here was a name and title, a portrait and paradox 
for Saul to take with him into Arabia to brood 
over beneath the stars! But yet Who art Thou, 
Lord ? Why should the Just One bear such 
wounds? Why should the Just One die? He 
died, the ‘fust for the unjust, that He might bring 
us to God. So Paul was continually passing from 
initiation to initiation, and each answer was 
but one more rung in a ladder whose flight reached 
up into the light which no man could approach 
unto. 
| Then Paul had to take all his other medleyed 
and tumbled facts (for the shock of that Damascus 
happening had made havoc of his universe), 


Introductory 39 


and rebuild them around this central Fact. “I 
rebuilt,” says Mazzini concerning what happened 
after his own decisive illumination, ‘‘ the entire 
edifice of my moral philosophy.” So did Paul. 
And no light labour can that be at any time, 
particularly when, all the while one is building 
upon it, one’s central Fact is continually flashing 
out with new significance—challenging one with 
some new projection—disclosing new dimensions 
from every new angle of vision. “We know 
in part,” said Paul in later years, after long experi- 
eucer oral! this >) “Sand! weilteach ‘also: in) part.” 
Who art Thou, Lord? Paul knew whom he 
had believed; but he had ceased to expect that 
the mortal years could ever bring to him the 
complete and final answer. 

And so, in the third place, Paul found this 
new and mighty central Fact continually and 
progressively testing and criticising all his other 
facts. ‘The stone which Saul of Jerusalem, as an 
unwise master-builder had rejected, was now 
requiring the reassembling and re-shaping of 
all the rest. Indeed, there were some seeming 
facts which failed altogether to support the 
weight of this new, tremendous Fact—some 
massive blocks, much prized by Saul of Jerusalem, 
and occupying a proud place in his architectural 
scheme, which crumbled and collapsed into dust 


40 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


beneath this once-rejected stone. Small wonder 
that he should presently find himself driven of 
the Spirit into Arabia, and that no word has 
reached us to break the silence of those Hidden 
Years wherein God was revealing His Son in 
Paul. 

But then not Arabia itself with its starry 
solitudes was enough. ‘There had to be also the 
return to Tarsus. Tarsus was Paul’s second and 
greater Arabia. There the holy stars of his 
childhood looked down upon him again, and 
occult solitudes of memory invited him, as he 
trod once more the familiar streets. The old 
home, the old haunts, the synagogue, the old 
familiar faces, and faces once familiar now seen 
no more—all these had to test Paul’s gospel, and 
work a work upon his heart which not Arabia 
itself could accomplish. That Life of Christ 
now being written upon the fleshy tablets of 
Paul’s heart was inscribed in Tarsus in characters 
indelibly deep. Such kindness and sympathy 
and faith as he found in Tarsus were more healing 
and confirming than any good word spoken 
later by those who were apostles before him ; 
and whatever of opposition he received there— 
the coolness, the arched eyebrows, the suspicion 
—was sharper for him than all the spears of Aretas. 

Altogether, some fifteen years had to pass 


Introductory Al 


after that happening on the Damascus road before 
the Holy Ghost said, “‘ Separate Me Barnabas 
and Saul for the work whereunto I have called 
them”; and at the end of those fifteen years 
Paul’s Life of Christ was no more than in its 
beginnings. For we have constantly to remember 
that into the fashioning of that Life of Christ 
had to pass not only the truth written by God 
upon Paul’s heart, but also Paul’s interpretation 
of that truth. So it had to be, or Paul’s Life 
of Christ would in no sense have been Paul’s. 
And Paul’s own interpretations were constantly 
being revised and enlarged. While he was yet 
a child in Christ, he thought as a child and under- 
stood as a child and spake as a child; as he grew 
in grace and in the knowledge of his Lord and 
Saviour, he came into a larger understanding, 
and spoke with a different enunciation and, as 
it were, in a deeper tone. Constantly as Paul 
himself grew in grace and thus in the knowledge 
of his Lord, that growing knowledge was criticising 
and re-criticising all the knowledge and precon- 
ceptions which Paul had brought with him at his | 
conversion and all the interpretations which he / 
had come to make in later years respecting the/ 
erotnot “Christ itself... Chere) was then dterce 
and all but fanatic intensity of the earlier years 
of faith (mirrored for us in the fierce and all but 


Y 
' 
4 


| 
4 
a 


42 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


fanatic intensity of the epistles to the Thessa- 
lonians), which had to pass into something calmer 
and deeper, more inward and more universal. 
The cruder Messianic conceptions which Paul 
the Christian had taken over from Saul the 
Pharisee had to come under criticism; Paul’s 
own most confident interpretations had to come 
under criticism; ‘for Jesus Christ Himself, in 
Paul’s ever-deepening knowledge of Him, was 
the Critic who wrought at the very heart of 


, Paul’s gospel. (Is it not in part the secret of 


Christianity’s power of perpetual self-renewal 
that its most potent and creative criticism comes 
from within itseli—that Christ Himself is the 
supreme Critic of every system which would 
‘define and interpret Him?) It was always 
possible, as Paul used to warn his fellow-workers, 
to have an assured foundation, and yet build 
upon it an invalid superstructure, or to introduce 
here and there unworthy and incongruous 
material; but against this there was the silent 
judgment which the Foundation itself passed 
upon all that was built upon it, and there were 


the fires of God (1 Cor. ili. 10-15). 


So we have to remember that even as to the 
earthly life of Christ, concerning which Paul, as he 
appears to suggest, ‘‘ historied ” Peter, and James 


Introductory 43 


the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem (Gal. 1. 18), and 
which he re-lived in his own spirit—even as to this, 
his own trials and reproaches, joys and sorrows, 
must have led him year by year into fuller under- 
standing and deeper insight; until whatever he 
possessed of a Gospel manual or Antiochan sum- 
mary of the Sayings and Acts of Jesus must have 
been at length so underscored and Beni: 
marked and annotated that only Paul himself / 
could read it. It was Arabia that expounded the 
Wilderness, the return to Tarsus that interpreted 
the return to Nazareth. It was not until he could 
write, “ being reviled we bless, being persecuted 
we endure, being defamed we entreat”’ that he 
understood the patience of Christ; not until 
he could say, ‘‘ we are made as the filth of the 
world, the offscouring of all things,” that he 
tasted the bitterness of his Lord’s rejection. 
That long journey wherein Paul, bound in spirit, 
and against all entreaty, set his face to go up to 
Jerusalem—that journey was the best interpreter 
of that other journey wherein his Master’s face 
was likewise set to go up to that same city. It 
was not until Paul himself had known the treacher- 
ous salutations of ‘‘ false brethren ”’ (2 Cor. xi. 
26) that he learned something of the darkness of 
that “ night in which He was betrayed,” and it 
was Paul’s own stripes and stigmata which helped, 


44 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


it may be, to expound to him the wounds of 
Jesus. But with such clues to go upon and 
with such daily tutoring from life itself and from 
the Holy Ghost, Paul did mystically re-live the 
life of Christ, until, with that “‘ continual heavi- 
ness and sorrow of heart” for his kinsmen after 
the flesh and that growing desire that he might 
even be Accursed*if only they might be saved, 
he came at length into some insight into the 
final mystery of all—came to see how it was in 
his Master’s heart to be made a Curse for us, and 
how He bore our curse to the Cross. 


And so but one other word remains to be added 
here, namely, That whilst Paul’s new life began 
with the discovery of the mastery and mystery of 
Christ, and continued in an ever-deepening sense 
of His spiritual Lordship, all this never cancelled 
but only confirmed his conception of the primacy 
of God the Father. Christ’s Lordship was ful- 
filled for Paul in this—That it brought him to 
God, brought him to a new joy in God, a new 
experience of life in God; it did not take the 
place of that experience; it was not entirely 
identical with it; it was wholly inseparable from 
it. Paul’s life was hid with Christ in God.— 
‘God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into 
your hearts, crying, 4bba, Father” (Gal. iv. 6). 


II 


PAUL’S LIFE OF CHRIST IN REVIEW 


In his epistle to the Philippians (41. 5-11), 
Paul has given us the great synopsis of his Life 
of Christ. But here it may not be unprofitable 
for us to bring together some of the scattered 
fragments and outlines of his Divine Biography as 
we find them in the Pauline writings and in the 
discourses attributed to Paul in the Acts of the 
Apostles. 


This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, 
that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners ; 
of whom I am chief. 

And without controversy great is the mystery of our 
religion ; *—it is He who was 


manifested in the flesh, 
justified in the spirit, 

seen of angels, 

preached among the nations, 
believed on in the world, 
received up in glory. 


Man the first ¢ is of the earth, earthy : 
Man the second is from Heaven. 


For He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn 
of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the 
heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things 
invisible ... all have been created through Him and unto 
* See Moffatt’s rendering. + See Moffatt. 
45 


46 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things 
cohere.—[For] this mind... was in Christ Jesus: being 
in the form of God, [He] counted it not a prize to be on 
an equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the 
LOnMOfia Servant. i... 

And I would not, brethren, have you ignorant how 
that our fathers... did all eat the same spiritual 
meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for 
they drank of a spiritual Rock that followed them; and 
the Rock was Christ.—But when the fulness of the time 
came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman— 
remember that Jesus Christ ... was of the seed of 
David according to my gospel—born under the Law, 
that He might redeem them which were under the Law, 
that we might receive the adoption of sons.—For of .. . 
[ David’s] seed hath God, according to promise, brought 
unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus : when John had first preached 
before His coming the baptism of repentance to all the 
people of Israel. And as John was fulfilling his course, 
he said, What suppose ye that J am? I am not He. 
But behold there cometh One after me, the shoes of 
whose feet I am not worthy to unloose.—{For]| John 
baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the 
people that they should believe in Him who should come 
after him, that is, in Jesus. 

And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled 
Himself.—For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
that, though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became 
poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich :— 
[and] ye remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He 
Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.-— 
Christ also pleased not Himself—becoming obedient 
even unto death, yea, the death of the cross :—as it is 
written, The reproaches of them that reproached Thee 
fell upon Me.—For they that dwell in Jerusalem and their 
rulers, because they knew Him not, nor the voices of the 


Paul's Life of Christ in Review 47 


prophets which are read every sabbath day, fulfilled them 
by condemning Him. 

[And] I received of the Lord that which also I delivered 
unto you, how that the Lord Jesus in the night in which 
He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given 
thanks, He brake it, and said, This is My body, which is 
for you: this doin remembrance of Me. In like manner 
also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new 
covenant in My blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, 
in remembrance of Me.—For I delivered unto you first 
of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for 
our sins according to the Scriptures.—For though they 
found no cause of death in Him, yet desired they Pilate 
that He should be slain ;—(before Pontius Pilate [He] 
witnessed the good confession) :—[and thus] the rulers 
of this world . . . crucified the Lord of Glory.—And 
when they had fulfilled all that was written of Him, they 
took Him down from the gibbet and laid Him in a 
sepulchre. 

But God raised Him up :—on the third day according 
to the Scriptures. And...He appeared unto Cephas ; 
then to the Twelve; then He appeared to above five 
hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part 
remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; then He 
appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of 
all He appeared to me also—to this so-called “ abortion ” 
of an apostle.* And you, being dead through your 
trespasses . . . you, I say, did He quicken together with 
. .. [Christ], having forgiven us all our trespasses ; 
having cancelled the regulations that stood against 
us—all these obligations He set aside when He nailed 
them to the cross, when He cut away the angelic Rulers 
and Powers from us, exposing them to all the world and 
triumphing over them in the cross.* 

[Thus, though] He was crucified through weakness, 


* See Moffatt. 


48 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


yet He liveth through the power of God; death no more 
hath dominion over Him. For the death that He died, 
He died unto sin once for all; but the life that He liveth, 
He liveth unto God.—({[And] if when we were enemies 
we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, 
much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His 
life..—Wherefore also God highly exalted Him, and gave 
unto Him the name which is above every name; that 
in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in 
heaven and things on earth, and things under the earth, 
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ 
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.—Seek [then] the 
things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right 
hand of God; who also maketh intercession for us. 

And... God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son 
into our hearts. [And this is] the mystery which hath 
been hid from all ages and generations, but now is made 
manifest to His saints . . . Christ in you, the hope of 
glory.—For if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is 
none of His. But he that 1s joined to the Lord is one 
spirit. For we are members of His body.—For two, 
saith He, shall be one flesh.—This is a great mystery: 
but I speak concerning Christ and His Church. 

And now ...{[God] commandeth men that they 
should all everywhere repent: inasmuch as He hath 
appointed a Day, in the which He will judge the world 
in righteousness by the Man whom He hath ordained ; 
whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that 
He hath raised Him from the dead.—For yourselves know 
perfectly that the Day of the Lord so cometh as a thief 
in the night; when “ all is well” and “ all is safe” are 
on the lips of men,* then sudden destruction cometh 
upon them, like pangs on a pregnant woman—escape 
there is none.—For the Lord Himself shall descend from 
heaven with a loud summons, with the voice of the 


* See Moffatt. 


Paul’s Life of Christ in Review 49 


archangel and the trumpet of God: and the dead in 
Christ shall rise first: then we that are alive, that are 
left, shall together with them be caught up on the clouds, 
to meet the Lord in the air: and so we shall be with the 
Lord for ever. (We know in part and we prophesy in 
part. For now we see in a mirror darkly.) 

Then cometh the end, when He shall deliver up the 
kingship to God, even the Father; when He shall have 
abolished all [other] rule and authority and power. 
—For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him 
should all the fulness dwell; and through Him to reconcile 
all things unto Himself, having made peace through the 
blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things 
upon the earth or things in the heavens.—For I reckon 
that the sufferings of this present time are a mere nothing * 
compared with the glory which shall be revealed... . 
For the Creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage 
of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of 
God. For... [Christ] must reign until He shall have 
put all His enemies under His feet. . . . But when all 
things have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son 
also Himself be subjected to Him that has put all things 
under Him, that God may be all in all—O the depth of 
the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God ! 
How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past 
tracing out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? 
or who hath been His counsellor? For of Him and 
through Him and unto Him are all things. To Him be 
the glory for ever. 


| (1) 
In the first place, then, Paul is very bold. 
Mark begins his Gospel with the Jordan baptism ; 
Matthew begins with Abraham; Luke goes back 


* See Moffatt. 
D 


50 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


to Adam, and then—as if Paul’s own spirit were 
there to urge him—he takes the further step 
beyond human generation and beyond time into 
God’s eternity. Luke does so treading on the 
slippery stepping-stones of genealogy, and after 
that one step across the awful frontier he shrinks 
back, as Swédenborg says the inferior angels do 
if ever they pass -beyond their own sphere and 
climate. But Paul, like John, is very bold, and 
takes all time in his stride, and passes over the 
bounds of earth’s beginnings far into the mystery 
of the timeless ages. Christ, he shows, was 
pre-existent; Christ was “rich”; He was rich 
in God; He was rich as being in the form of God. 
And if in all this Paul was necessarily thinking 
of the Eternal Son and not primarily of the 
time-born Son of Mary, yet his thought is robbed 
of all meaning the moment we deny or obscure 
the vital continuum between the two conceptions. 
So that at the outset of our reconstruction of 
Paul’s Life of Christ we are faced by the question 
how he came by this transcendent faith.— 


“¢ Where did Paul get his Christ ? ” 
(2) 


In the second place we have the suggestion 
of a cosmic Life of Christ. In the Pauline epistle 
to the Colossians we are brought to the founding 
of the worlds, the sowing of the fields of space; 


Paul’s Life of Christ in Review 51 


and the Sower is Christ. “In Him were all 
things created ’’—brought forth out of His own 
deep, ageless Life in God. That is to say, Paul’s 
sense of the quickening Life of Christ, begun as 
an experience of grace and truth in His own soul, 
had grown till he could set no bounds to it; 
had grown till he divined it as thrilling and 
swelling through all things. So that the Real 
Presence was for him not simply in the bread and 
wine of the Holy Feast, it was also in every sheaf 
and vine; it was something cosmic, eternal, 
and the universe itself was a living thing sustained 
by that one great Life, even the life of God in 
Christ. 
(3) 


Then again we have hints of a life of Christ in 
the experience of men, traced through the ages 
of antiquity. ‘“* All our fathers did eat the same 
spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual 
drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock 
which accompanied them, and that Rock was 
Ghiist,? (1. Cor. x. 4). The ‘purpose: of ‘the 
declaration is indeed to enforce a stern warning 
against certain unworthy and magical views of 
Baptism and the Eucharist; but the suggestion 
remains that all that was vital in the experience 
of the fathers was mediated through the eternal 
Christ. In a certain mystical sense, Paul’s Christ 
was dividual, not individual; His life was always 


52 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


being broken and poured forth, for the sustenance 
of mankind, and in the breaking and outpouring 
It was always coming into its infinite increase : 
equally, too, in another sense, He was supremely 
individual (“‘ Is Christ divided? ’’), the One in 
whom we are all complete, and through whom all 
things shall at last find their divine integrity. 


(4) 

The fourth stage in Paul’s Life of his Lord 
shows Him found in fashion as a man. We note 
that there is no hint of any birth-miracle save the 
wonder of that birth itself. “‘ When the fulness 
of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, 
born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 
iv. 4). Nor can we glean from Paul’s records any 
mention of miracle at all, save the crowning 
wonder of the rising again of that Life out of the 
darkness and silence of the tomb. ‘The “ mind 
of Christ,” that is what Paul would dwell upon— 
the mind of Christ as set forth in the humility 
and obedience and sufferings of Jesus. ‘The 
whole earthly life and Passion of Jesus was for 
him the supreme miracle, so that there was 

a secret and a mystery 
Between one footfall and the next. 

Another thought always present in Paul’s 

mind concerning Christ’s earthly life was the 


Paul's Life of Christ in Review 53 


redemptive necessity which lay behind it. It 
was not in Paul to view the life of Jesus simply as 
an alluring display of moral excellence or His 
Passion simply as a supreme exhibition of Divine 
love. It was that; but for Paul it was more. 
He contemplated the awful necessity of redeeming 
grace. We understand that the implications 
of the conception of “ fallen human nature ”— 
a great word with our fathers, and one to which 
we have temporarily lost the clue—were funda- 
mental to the Pauline thought. 

Again we observe touches which heighten the 
conception of divine drama. Jesus is ‘‘ seen of 
angels.”? ‘The veil lifts upon the conflicting forces 
of the over-world and under-world of spirit. 
Jesus wages war upon invisible principalities and 
powers of darkness, triumphing over them (Col. 
ii. 15). (Need we suspect a suggestion of 
unreality here? Is it only our earthly shadow- 
play that is dramatic? Is not Reality dramatic 
also? Is not the original Drama in the unseen ?) 


(5) 


The next great chapter in Paul’s Divine 
Biography sets forth Christ’s victory over death, 
His return to, and ministry in, the invisible 
world. He was “raised the third day ’’— 
“received up into glory.” 


54. St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


As we have said, in the order of Paul’s own 
experience, this, together with his teaching con- 
cerning the mystical Life of Christ in His saints, 
was the first, and became the central, chapter of 
all. ‘To these teachings belong all that Paul has 
to say concerning Christ as the Eternal Con- 
temporary of His people, concerning Christ in 
the fellowship of -all believers, concerning Him 
as now mediating God to man and founding and 
fashioning the true Zion, the mother-city of the 
soul. For “‘ He that descended is the same also 
that ascended far above all the heavens ” (Eph. iv. 
10); and Paul is quick to show that this ascension 
was not a departure, but a liberation of his 
Master’s presence—“‘ that He might fill all 
things.” He was raised, and exalted to that 
supreme sphere, that He might bestow new 
gifts and empowerments upon men, and prepare 
the whole Creation for investiture with that robe 
of righteousness which was of His own weaving, 
woven upon the loom of the Cross. But not 
Paul himself can do more than faintly sketch the 
Life of Christ in the invisible world and all the 
projections of His reconciling ministry in the 
unseen. Not 


in our little day 
May His devices with the heavens be guessed. * 


* Alice Meynell, Christ in the Universe. 


Paul’s Life of Christ in Review 55 


(6) 


So we come to the chapter on the Blessed Hope, 
concerning which it is enough to say here that 
throughout Paul’s epistles and this Pauline Life 
of Christ which they contain, there is the’note 
of waiting, of expectancy. ‘The world is moving 
toward a crisis; time is hastening toward the 
Day of Christ; the stream of earthly history is 
flowing swiftly and silently toward its consum- 
mation. And if, as we shall see later, this faith 
was interpreted in ways which reveal Paul as a 
man and not a mechanised instrument of pure 
ideas, was it less vitally true on that account? 
There remains the divine, inwrought conviction 
that Christ’s salvation must be on the grand 
scale or not atall; that it must mean something 
for the world as a world; that here on earth 
righteousness must be wrought out to its divine 
crisis; that Christ must finally and decisively 
be reckoned with. 


(7) 


And thus, lastly, we have Paul’s forelookings 
toward the great redemptive consummation. 
“Then cometh the end ”—the end without end, 
the beginning of the glory that is beyond all 


conceiving. 


56 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


As to the outworking of the redemptive purpose, 
we are now living, Paul would show, in an inter- 
mediate age. As to that purpose, even Jesus 
Christ Himself and His saints who are with Him 
are as yet in an intermediate, though infinitely 
glorious, state. As Paul indicates it, they are 
within the region of the great Until: “for He 
must reign until. ... .” For while yet Creation 
groans in the throes of Christ’s cosmic birth, 
as Time once laboured in the throes of His 
human birth; while yet there are enmities to be 
abolished, powers to be subdued, worlds to be 
reconciled and paracleted—while yet these things 
are so, Christ must remain divinely unsatisfied — 
and His redemptive Life unconsummated. For 
He must reign till He hath put all enemies under 
His feet. But then cometh the end, when He 
shall deliver up the kingship to God, even the 
Father. For when all things have been subjected 
unto the Son, then shall the Son also Himself 
be subjected unto the Father who put all things 
under Him, that God may be all in all. 

It is with this vision, this “ brave text,” as 
Emerson calls it,*—-specially to be prized, he 
thinks, by the Christian philosopher (but how 
much more by the saint?)—that Paul draws 
his Life of Christ to its always-unfinished end. 

+ Kesay 2“ Gercles, 


Til 
CHRIST BEFORE THE AGES 


1. THe Pautine OvuTLookx. 


Surely we shall come to mental grief if, in our 
thought about Paul and about Paul’s own 
thought concerning his Lord, we read into his 
mind the mind of Athanasius or of Augustine 
or of any that were apostles (and metaphysicians) 
after him. For it should be sufficiently clear 
that Paul was not Athanasius or Augustine; nor 
was he living in the Niczan or Augustinian world. 
Paul was Paul; and he lived in his own world. 
And intellectually and theologically Paul’s 
world had nothing to do with the later Alexandria 
or with Constantinople or with Nicza or Hippo 
or with the later Rome, but with Tarsus and 
Jerusalem and Damascus and Arabia and Antioch 
and with the Rome of Augustus and Claudius 
and Nero, and with the Jerusalem which is above, 
_and which is the mother of usall. In other words. 
Paul was the explorer and pioneer, not the 
precise cartographer and surveyor; he was “ de- 
scrying new lands and a new law,” not measuring 

57 


58 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


and mapping a region which others had descried 
before him. 

If we look, for instance, for the Athanasian 
metaphysic in Paul, shall we find it? For the 
most part, if we study him, for example, in his 
prayers and his prepositions, we shall find him 
in a world quite other than Athanasius’. That 
Is to say, Paul had not resolved his thought 
concerning God and Jesus Christ into a formal 
metaphysical unity. Has it not been well said 
that, if he had written his letters for future 
generations, he would have coined his mighty 
phrases, not “for Anselm or Johann Gerhard,” 
but “ for Johann Sebastian Bach”? * By which 
we are to infer that it is the poet-musician, and 
not the theological dogmatist, who approaches 
nearest to the Pauline mood. 

If we are to summarise Paul’s Christology at all, 
shall we not find it contained potentially in his 
living experience that Jesus Christ had, in his 
own phrase, brought him to God—to a new sense 
of God—a new life in Him, a new joy in Him? 

For—to glance back once more to Paul’s past— 
there was a time when he did not joy in God. 
He believed in Him, he feared Him, he had a 
certain fierce zeal for Him; but save, it may be, 


* Adolf Deissmann, The Religion of Fesus and the Faith of 
Paul, p. 202. 


Christ Before the Ages 59 


for such openings of mind and soul as came to 
him in his earliest days—moments of — occult 
recollection wherein for the while it was almost 
as if he had caught at a forgotten, secret word— 
save, it may be, for such times, he did not joy in 
God. The mystical hunger and thirst of the 
soul was there—for had he not always the mystical 
capacity ?—but it remained unsatisfied, perhaps 
unrecognised. Andon this account great portions 
even of the Old Testament, in which he was so 
deeply learned, were veiled to him, as they were 
veiled to all his countrymen in that age. Portions 
of the Psalms, for instance, with their intimacy 
and sweetness of confiding trust and communion, 
were veiled and more than veiled. The very 
doors, so to say, of the Scriptures were closed 
and Saul was outside, and the feasting and song 
were not for him. 

And then the great change came. First, as 
we know, came the overpowering discovery of the 
Lordship of Jesus, and then, presently, those 
closed doors swung open with a burst of light and 
song: the door, let us say, of the 23rd Psalm, 
and of the gist, and the 139th, and a hundred 
_ other unsuspected doors in the Law itself and in 
the Prophets, all swung open for him; Creation 
itself, and Paul’s own heart and mind also 
seemed full of opening doors. For Jesus Christ 


60 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


was opening up to Paul, not only Moses and the 
Prophets, but all the universe, and that inner 
universe which was Paul himself, and leading him 
into a new sense of Reality, a new-found love for 
God, a new life in Him, a new joy in Him. 

All this we have to bear in mind if we would 
seek to understand Paul’s thought concerning 
Jesus Christ and concerning God—if we would 
seek to understand the world of meaning and of 
spiritual autobiography packed into the great 
Pauline prepositions—in Christ—through Christ— 
with Christ—in God—unto God. Especially must 
we bear it in mind if we would seek to understand 
how Paul ever came to speak of Christ as being 
- in the form of God. 

For Paul there is one Lord of the Spiritual 
Life—Jesus Christ,—and one God—the Father, 
who is over all and through all and in all :—there 
is one God, and one mediator between God and 
man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a 
ransom forall. As the head of man is Christ, so the 
head of Christ is God: for as we are Christ’s, so 
Christ is God’s, and our life is hid with Christ in 
God: we are thus heirs of God, and joint-heirs 
with Christ. For though there be that are called 
gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are 
gods many and lords many, yet to us there is One 


God, the Father, of whom are all things and we 


Christ Before the Ages 61 


unto Him, and One Lord, Jesus Christ, through 
whom are all things and we through Him.* ‘This, 
we may take it, had come to be Paul’s interpre- 
tation of his own experience. ‘The fact remains 
that notwithstanding all the Pauline emphasis 
upon the primacy of God, the Father, Paul can 
find no category for Christ that falls below the 
Divine mystery. It may be, indeed, that we have 
need to watch ourselves lest we press Paul’s 
terms into the service of a later pedantry. Do we 
perfectly know what he meant by “the form of 
God”? But whatever clue we follow, we are led 
into the light of a glory that is unsearchable. 
Perhaps we may dare to say that for Paul Jesus 
Christ was a mystery in a sense more inscrutable 
than God the Father Himself. It seems as if 
for Christ Paul has no clear category at all. We 
are reminded of the mystical word: ‘“‘ No man 
knoweth the Father save the Son and he to whom 
the Son willeth to reveal Him: [but| no man 
knoweth the Son save the Father ”’ only. 


We shall be told in explanation of Paul’s 
thought concerning Christ in His pre-existence 
_and heavenly glory that our apostle developed his 
gospel in a Gentile soil and climate, and that in 
that world such a process and product of thought 


Spee 1 Cortam..3) 


62 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


was not altogether without certain suggestive 
affinities and precedents. And then, it may be, 
we shall be reminded that Paul was a propagandist 
for Christ and His spiritual Lordship in an 
empire wherein Cesar’s sovereignty itself was 
expressed, if not in terms of pre-existence, at 
least in terms of divinity; and again, that even 
Paul’s upbringing as a Jew and a Pharisee, and 
his training as a rabbi, had urged his mind toward 
some such conception as he had at length attained 
unto: that is to say, Paul as a Jew and a Pharisee 
and a rabbi had been brought up in the romantic 
hope of a supernatural, Heaven-born Messiah 
and in the belief in an original, archetypal 
Heavenly Man. And yet again we shall be taken 
back to Plato and to the Platonic revival, to 
Philo and the Alexandrian school, and to their 
possible influence upon Paul and his Christian 
contemporaries. — 

But after we have given due heed to all these 
things, shall we be left with the clue which nobly 
solves for us the secret of this great first chapter 
in Paul’s Life of Christ ? 

And does the addition of our more psychological 
and psychical explanations leave us with the whole 
secret in our hands? It is clear that Paul, like 
many a mystic before and since his time, claimed 
the power of penetrating by revelation into the 


Christ Before the Ages 63 


celestial arcana, arriving at his ideas by other than 
normal intellective processes. But if to say this 
is to say no more than that his innermost mental 
conceptions were in this way displayed and 
dramatised before him, it is still left for us to 
inquire how they came to be there and what 
called them forth. 

After all, is there any satisfying explanation, 
worthy of Paul, worthy of his moral dignity 
and the height of his inspiration—worthy, even, 
of our own serious approach to him—apart from 
this, that he believed what he did because, face 
to face with Jesus Christ, he could do no other? 
Are we not at length led to see that that Life of 
Christ which was being lived in Paul’s broken and 
renewed heart was a life to which there was 
for him no ultimate conclusive explanation in 
Nazareth or Bethlehem or anywhere else soever, 
save in the eternities with God Himself? Jesus 
Christ as Paul had come to know Him had about 
Him the rumour and mystery of the Godhead ; 
and the Holy Ghost testified within Paul that 


this was so. 


2. PauL AND THE Mopern MIND. 


And for our own part, beset as we are to-day by 
a thousand questions and dubieties, can we find 


64 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


our minds’ abiding tabernacle on the terrestrial 
side of this mystery, or find rest at any point on 
that bridge over which Paul travelled eager and 
unresting—the bridge which spans the chasm 
between Bethlehem and the Eternal Years? 
Came that Life out of the void or out of the 
Great Deep? That Life with its holy secret, 
with the purpose of the Cross slowly unfolding, 
to open at last into the crimson bloom of the 
Divine Passion—shall we be content to trace it 
back through the tale of human generations, the 
darkness of primeval jungles, the slime and scum 
of primeval swamps, to its blind beginnings among 
the solar gases? No “spirit of truth” shall we 
ever find bearing witness with our spirits to so 
forlorn a conclusion! But then shall we think 
of that life, drawn from out the boundless deep 
of Divine Being, as an unconscious stream, an 
emanation, a sleeping tide, slowly at length 
awaking to itself beneath the Syrian stars—utter- 
ing itself at last with the voice of many waters 
breaking upon the rocks of Golgotha—receding 
again into the eternal silence to leave only 
confused, reverberant echoes to trouble the 
cavernous shores which it once invaded? Surely 
this were a languid and pathetic theosophy 
savouring less of eternal verity than of the limp 
reaction of sophisticated minds. If we concede 


Christ Before the Ages 65 


as much concerning Jesus, must we not concede 
more? 

What do we know of the reach and history of 
our own beginnings? ‘* Man is a stream whose 
source is hidden.”? But what, as we survey our 
own lives, is no more than a weak peradventure, 
becomes in Jesus Christ a challenge to audacious 
faith. Manifestly He has brought to earth a 
mystery that is not of time. In Him humanity 
is full-orbed, effulgent, and in His light we see 
light. For Paul, at any rate, it was no strange 
thing that He who had shown Himself lord of 
death should be lord of birth also. 

If Paul is driven to affirm a Pre-existent Christ, 
the Archetypal Man, the Man from Heaven, 
“through whom are all things and we through 
Him,” an Emerson, recking little of Gamaliel 
nor yet of Philo, but knowing the sincere milk 
of the Platonic word, will affirm the Over Soul 
to which we who live in succession, in parts and 
particles, are all equally related. In wise silence, 
in infinite repose and recollection, in universal 
beauty and universal truth, and in the deep heart 
of man, the Over Soul hath its dwelling. By 
which it may appear, indeed, that the Emersonian 
~ Over Soul is a sublimated and infinitely magnified 
Emerson (for so our minds will reflect that in 


Reality which reflects ourselves). But if one day 
E 


66 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


in the Concord woods or, let us say, on the road 
to Boston, the Over Soul had proclaimed itself 
to Emerson as One who wore the stripes of the 
Southern slaves, the wounds of Gettysburg and 
Vicksburg and the Battles of the Wilderness ; 
or if that day the Over Soul had proclaimed itself 
to him not in Platonic speech and accent, but in 
his own homelier American, somehow strangely 
recalling the sonorous voice of Abraham Lincoln, 
slain a while before—from that hour would 
Emerson have been able any longer to think of his 
Over Soul simply as the supernal Sage, the 
supreme dispassionate ‘I’ranscendenta] Philoso- 
pher? After that happening on the Damascus road 
and that illumination in the house of Judas on the 
street called Straight, it was, at any rate, not 
possible for Paul to rest in the thought of any 
Platonic Logos or Over Soul as the supreme Sage 
of eternity. He must find place for the wounds 
of Jesus. The Wisdom of God is also the 
Redeemer, the bleeding Victim of His own holy 
love and of human sin. 


So for Paul the point is not that Christ dwelling 
in the eternal light, reached after equality with 
God (that was Cesar’s way), but that from 
eternity His mind was set upon something other 
and far different. 


Christ Before the Ages 67 


Was not Czsar, also, something more than 
himself—the symbol and manifestation, emergent 
in the visible world, of certain forces, personal 
or otherwise, at work within this disordered 
universe? Is there not subtly present in Paul’s 
thought a certain antithesis between the Mind 
that was in Christ and the Mind that was in 
Cesar? Both the Mind of Cesar and the Mind 
of Christ were alike the mind of Conquest; the 
difference lay in the motive and the means. 
Czsar thought it a prize to be grasped at to be on 
an equality with the gods; Cesar was rich and 
had a mind to be yet richer; Czsar was for 
making himself of great and yet greater reputa- 
tion; Czsar was fain to fill all things by ascent 
to self-lauding power. Christ, being in the form 
of God, thought it not a prize to be grasped at to 
claim equal honours with the Most High; Christ, 
being rich, for our sakes became poor; Christ 
made Himself of no reputation; Christ would 
fill all things through His descent first to the 
deepest depths of self-abnegation. Czsar sought 
conquest through self-expansion, the establish- 
ment of a throne, the imposition of a Law; 
Christ sought conquest by self-oblation, the setting 
up of a Cross, the bestowal of Grace. 

Had not Paul come to perceive these two 
conflicting Minds warring in the universe and 


68 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


warring, too, within himself? Had he not 
already foreseen, even in his own day, the ultimate 
joining of the issue, Christ or Cesar? ‘There 
were, plainly, sufficient reasons why in his epistles 
he should not elaborate the idea, but can we trace 
no hint of it? It is too uncritical to suggest that 
it is some future and imminent Cesar that Paul 
has in mind when he speaks of the Man of Sin— 
the adversary who should oppose and exalt 
himself against all that is called God or that is 
worshipped—sitting in the temple of God and 
setting himself forth as God (2 Thess. 11. 3, 4)? 
And is not the Man of Sin Satan’s own Logos, 
the supreme embodiment of spiritual rebellion, 
the Darkness that darkeneth every man? At all 
events, Paul attained to a point which the world 
has yet to reach; he passed utterly and for ever 
out of Czsarism into Christ. ‘‘ The grace of our 
Lord flooded my life along with the faith and love 
that Christ Jesus inspires” (1 Tim. i. 14: Moffatt). 


IV 
CHRIST IN CREATION AND IN MAN 


1. THE Cosmic Passion. 


Of Michelangelo, Walter Pater quotes Grimm 
as saying: ‘‘ When one speaks of him, woods, 
clouds, seas, and mountains disappear, and only 
what is formed by the spirit of man remains 
behind.” * In a sense this is true of Paul. If we 
look to him for a merely lyrical appreciation of 
Nature, it is in vain; Paul’s interpretations are 
not lyrical but epic, and it is deeply true that for 
him woods, clouds, seas and mountains do presently 
dissolve into some mighty manifestation of the 
spirit of man. But then we may also add of Paul 
as Pater of Michelangelo: ‘“‘ With him the very 
rocks seem to have life—they have but to cast 
away the dust and scurf that they may rise and 
stand on their feet.” 


To begin with: we may be sure that Paul’s 
conversion and illumination wrought in him a 
more imaginative and mystical appreciation of 


* “The Renaissance,” chapter on Michelangelo. 


69 


70 St. Pauls Life of Christ 
Nature than he had known before. We may say 


indeed that Paul’s interest in Nature was evan- 
gelical. Not all the cosmic ideas active or latent 
in the mind of Saul of Jerusalem could have com- 
municated to him such insight and sympathy and 
intensity of feeling as we find in the great 
“‘ Creation ”’ passage in Romans vill. It is Paul’s 
sense of the quickening and redeeming life of 
Christ, begun as an experience of redeeming grace 
in his own soul, and growing till he could set no 
bounds to it—this sense of grace and redemption 
it is which throbs at the centre of his thought 
concerning Nature. What Tennyson sang of his 
friend, Paul could have addressed with infinitely 
deeper meaning to Christ :— 


Strange friend, past, present and to be, 
Loved deeplier, darklier understood ; 
Behold I dream a dream of good, 

And mingle all the world with thee. 


Thy voice is on the rolling air, 
I hear thee where the waters run; 
Thou standest in the rising sun 
And in the setting thou art fair.* 


For Paul, within and beneath the infinite taci- 
turnity of Nature there was a universal heart-beat 
that throbbed right up to the surface of things; 
the universe was a living thing, and its life was 


* [Tn Memoriam. 


Christ in Creation and in Man 71 


not simply the impulsion of a blind unmoral 
energy; it was hid with Christ in God. 

And in Nature, too, the life of Christ was a 
Passion. For Paul is very bold, and follows his 
subjective clue to its conclusion. The universe 
which was Paul himself and the universe which 
was Creation as a whole were intersphered, and 
the life of Christ which was energizing mightily 
in Paul toward Paul’s complete redemption was 
likewise energizing mightily in Creation unto 
Creation’s complete redemption. Creation and 
ourselves, it would appear, are in the throes of 
a like re-birth. 

For Paul in this mighty chapter in his Life of 
Christ leaves Darwin far behind in his realism, 
as also he leaves Wordsworth far behind in his 
mystical idealism. Paul has felt all that Words- 


worth came to feel of that immanent Presence in 2 


4 
; 


Nature which disturbs us with the joy of elevated j 


thoughts; but he has felt, too, that Nature is in 
bondage, that there is a great cosmic struggle 
which has to be worked out; that there are in 
Nature rude and tormenting passions and as it 
were baffling futilities. This, says Paul, is a 
passing phase, and the ultimate responsibility for 
all the cosmic agony is with God : for the Creation 
was ‘“‘ subject to vanity, not by its own will, but 
by reason of Him .. .”: but this present phase is 


Fhe. St. Paul's Life of Christ 


none the less real on that account. ‘“* For the 
earnest expectation of the Creation waiteth for 
the revealing of the sons of God... . For we 
know that the whole Creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain together until now.” With 
Paul it is indeed true that “ the very rocks seem 
to have life—they have but to cast away the dust 
and scurf that they may rise and stand on their 
feet’! 


And then, as we follow the thought of our 
spiritual and apostolic Michelangelo, it becomes 
more and more plain to us that, as Grimm says 
of his great Florentine, “when one speaks of 
him, woods, clouds, seas, and mountains dis- 
appear, and only what is formed by the spirit of 
man remains ;”’—always, of course, interpreting 
that saying evangelically and in due subordination 
to the creative and redemptive sovereignty of God. 

Creation, says Paul, is waiting for the sons of 
God, for the New Humanity. That is to say, 
the clue to the Cosmos, to the meaning of the 
cosmic struggle, isin man. ‘There is much in the 
ordering of things which seems to belie any sort 
of faith in a beneficent creative purpose; it is 
only as we pass from exterior Nature to that which 
is interior—to human nature and its redemptive 
promise—that we touch for ourselves the moral 


Christ in Creation and in Man 73 


purpose which runs through all things. Man 
challenges the cosmic order. And there is, 
perhaps, in the whole of Paul’s outlined and 
fragmentary Life of Christ no portion more daring 
and tremendous than that portion which treats 
of this theme. When we think of Paul’s own 
inherited idea of the universe—a flat earth with 
its lamp-lit dome above and its underworld 
beneath—a Creation whose years were numerable 
and whose days were numbered—we are the more 
amazed that he ever came to see what he did see 
and what he is at pains to make us see. 

According to Paul, the life of Christ in Creation 
and the life of Christ in Redemption converge 
toward the manifestation of the sons of God—the 
New Humanity. At this point Nature and 
human nature are brought so close together in 
Paul’s thought that it almost seems as if he were 
feeling toward the faith that Creation itself is in 
process of becoming human in Christ; as if in 
mountain and wood and sea and all that they 
contain there were a nascent spiritual affinity 
with humanity, and we without them should not 
be made perfect; as if Christed man should at 
last be able to say ‘‘ I—Nature,’’ and Nature, 
“J—Man.” “ For Creation itself shall be de- 
livered from the bondage of corruption into the 
glorious liberty of the children of God.” 


74. St. Paul's Life of Christ 


However this may be, it is clear that when Paul, 
our Michelangelo, hews from the rock this 
statuary image of Nature as a plagued, dishevelled 
captive, mighty in her bonds, leaning forward 
with shaded eyes to scan the far horizon for the 
appearing of the sons of God, he gives us, by 
suggestion, not one symbol but a series. 

For must not Creation have waited in like 
manner first of all for the advent of Man? And 
in the fulness of the time he comes; he raises 
his rude altars and goes questing and questioning 
through the earth, seeking to know, seeking to 
attain. Did not Nature come to a new birth in 
him—to a new chance of understanding and of 
being understood ?— 

The winds 
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 


A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh, 
Never a senseless gust now man is born.* 


But the Dawn Man, as Paul well understood, 
did not set Nature free. We have Paul’s con- 
ception of the Dawn Man, too (1 Cor. xv. 45, 
46)—a man of the earth, earthy. Pater’s descrip- 
tion of Michelangelo’s own creation will stand, 
perhaps, for Paul’s as well: “in that languid 
figure . . . something rude and satyr-like, some- 
thing akin to the rugged hill-side on which it 


* Browning, Pauline. 


Christ in Creation and in Man 75 
lies.” And Paul’s Dawn Man is himself in bonds. 


“The first man became an animate being” ; 
tne first. man is of the earthy ‘earthy ss ssithat 
is not first which is spiritual, but that which is 
natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” 
Moreover, the Dawn Man fell. 

For when little Saul of Tarsus knelt at his 
mother’s knee and was instructed in the sacred 
Scriptures, he was taught out of the Book of 
Beginnings how the Dawn Man, the first Adam, 
so full of wonderful possibilities, so eager to learn 
and to put names on things and to become wise, 
had yet been beguiled by an evil power already 
abroad in the lower creation; had allowed 
himself to be ensnared into letting that mind be 
in him which was also in the cunningest and 
subtilest of the creatures of the field. How that 
mind, that evil mind, came to work in the lower 
creation the Book of Beginnings did not say; 
but so it was; the evil principle was there, already 
in the earth, before man. And now it was as if 
the Dawn Man were marked, so to say, with the 
slime and venom of the snake, and as if that evil 
strain of the lower world had worked in him to 
keep him down in his earthiness and away from 
his predestined heavenliness, and to multiply 
sorrows upon him and upon the earth itself. 
But then also young Saul was taught out of that 


76 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


same wise book that the Dawn Man and his kind 
were always warring against that strain, never 
wholly giving in to it—always smiting, as it were, 
at the serpent’s head, though always, too, being 
bruised and venomed afresh. (Here in this 
strange divine enmity put into man against that 
beguiling evil which beset him, did Paul, later, 
see the first evidence of that hidden life of Christ 
in Creation and in Man?) 


So the quest continues. Creation in bondage 
still listens for the footfall of the deliverer: a 
thousand imprisoned energies in earth and sea 
and air call for release. Long before Paul’s day 
Man the Thinker, the Civilizer, had appeared, 
taking up the Dawn Man’s task, and had wrought 
prodigiously upon the earth. Him, also, Paul 
has limned out for us; and we see in that ruthless 
sculpturing, as he means us to see, the reason of 
Creation’s continued bondage. For Man the 
Civilizer has that same evil strain in him which 
was in his fathers, accentuated by all his increase 
of knowledge; he had held down the truth in 
unrighteousness, and, becoming vain, his foolish 
heart had been darkened; professing himself to 
be wise, he had become a fool, until that darkened 
heart of his had come to be brimful of envy, 
murder, malignity, intrigue (Rom. i. 18-32: 


Christ in Creation and in Man 77 


see Moffatt). This is our apostolic Michel- 
angelo’s sculpture of Man the Civilizer, toying 
with baubles, unconscious of his fall, uncon- 
scious of his true task, his mighty brow darkened 
with folly. 

Creation, then, is still in bondage because Man 
has failed her. The cosmic life of Christ is still 
a Passion, a crucifixion. It is as if the Christ of 
Nature stands bound in the judgment-hall of 
Man,—as if the very stones cry out in the voice 
of the eternal Victim, ‘“‘ Man, Man, why per- 
secutest thou Me?” 


And yet, as Paul sees it, it is Man that must 
indeed break Creation’s chains, Man it is that 
must lead forth Nature as the King’s daughter 
into her queenly inheritance. And for Paul it is 
as if Nature knew it; as if the Holy Ghost testified 
within her that through Man her redemption 
should yet be brought to pass. This is Nature’s 
Gospel, for the life of Christ in Creation must 
fulfil itself at last in a race of liberators—the- 
sons of men who are also sons of God. 

And who are these sons of God, as Paul foresees 
them, that shall set Creation free, so wonderfully 
_ relating themselves to the hidden possibilities 
within the now vexed and troubled soul of Nature 
—who are they but the saints who shall appear 


78 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


with Christ at His glorious coming, and they also 
who, being still on earth, shall be changed out of 
all their earthiness into His heavenliness? Who 
are they but the New Humanity which is the 
fuller incarnation of Christ Himself? May we 
not infer that it was Paul’s faith that yonder in 
the unseen they who had experienced immortality 
and were with Christ were being schooled in the 
higher lore of their divine sonship, and that here 
among the novitiate saints on earth the work of 
preparation was likewise going on? And Paul 
knew not the day or the hour when the sons of 
God should gloriously appear, and when the hills 
should break forth before them into singing, and 
all the trees of the field should clap their hands. 


‘“‘Even apostles must have their illusions” ! 
O divine illusion that could send forth under the 
stars this scarred and branded, shrunken-bodied 
man, and persuade him that the earth beneath 
his feet was tremulous and convulsive with an 
agony that was an unborn glory! O divine 
illusion that could make him feel of sun and moon 
and all the starry host,—of rock and cloud, bird 
and beast and all living things—that they and he 
were of the same family, sharers of like sorrows 
and a like immortal hope,—called unto “ the 


glorious liberty of the children of God”! O 


Christ in Creation and in Man 79 


divine illusion, return thou unto us! Art not thou 
more true than all our disillusion and despair? 


2. CHRIST IN THE SPIRITUAL History OF THE 
RACE. 


The ways of God with mankind make up a 
Bible clearer, more intimate than anything we 
can discern in the Bible of Creation; and the 
life of Christ, the urge of the Spirit, half-revealed 
and half-concealed in Nature, move toward their 
fuller manifestation in mankind. 


For one thing, according to Paul, there is a 
certain Law-work going on in the heart and 
conscience of man, Jew and Gentile alike; and 
this law-work is preparatory to the fuller coming 
and activity of Christ. All of Paul’s early training 
in Tarsus and all his later training at the feet of 
Gamaliel helped him to see this, helped him to 
see that though from Adam onward our fathers 
continued to carry in their veins the venom of 
the serpent, yet there has always been a dis- 
cernible touch of God in man: and _ perhaps 
there is nothing in which Paul is more daringly 
himself than in his working out of this conception 
and of what follows from it. 

Two things, we are told, filled Immanuel Kant 
with admiration and awe—the starry heavens 


So St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


above and the moral law within; and these two 
things filled Paul, also, with a like sense of wonder 
and worship. As he considered the heavens, the 
work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars 
which He hath ordained, it became more and 
more plain to him that ‘the invisible things of 
God since the creation of the world are clearly 
seen, being perceived through the things that 
are made, even His everlasting power and God- 
head.” Moreover, even the Gentiles, who have 
not Moses’ Law, ‘‘ show the work of the Law 
written in their hearts, their conscience bearing 
witness therewith, and their thoughts one with 
another accusing or else excusing them” (Rom. 
u.). Sothat over and above all that was written 
of the Law upon tables of stone and upon 
embroidered synagogue-scrolls there was the 
writing of the divine oracles by the finger of God 
upon the tablets of man’s own heart. 


But then there was something more. Paul 
will suggest to us, 1t seems, a certain strange 
interlinear writing, discernible in man’s heart, 
between the lines of the Law. For the Law was 
fixed, the Law was inexorable; the Law, that 
is to say, was always the Law; and no man 
falling short of its obedience could hope from it 
for glory or honour or immortality, or look for 


Christ in Creation and in Man 81 


aught beside accusation and condemnation and 
wrath. And yet Paul seems to suggest that men 
did hope for glory and honour and immortality, 
and did so, presumably, because it was somehow 
in their hearts to do so. It was in the hearts of 
Jew and Gentile alike to do so. Jew and Gentile 
alike, each in his own way, hoped by patient 
continuance in well-doing, even though it must 
needs be imperfect well-doing, to attain at length 
to that glory and honour and immortality which 
were witnessed to by their own spirits within 
them. For it seems clear that when Paul speaks 
of this (Rom. 11. 4-11), it is as of something deeply 
known already. He recognizes a something which 
is neither wholly of the Law nor wholly of the 
Gospel, which we have called an interlinear word 
of hope. ‘‘ Glory and honour and peace to every 
man that worketh good ”’ (v. 10), though no man 
with all his good working can fulfil the righteous- 
ness of the perfect Law. Whence came this hint 
of uncovenanted mercy written thus in the heart 
of man? ‘There is a Law, says Euripides (dis- 
cerning that oracle within his own heart), which 
is above all gods, which makes them and unmakes. 
But now is there also an everlasting kindness and 
good-will which dwelleth in the shadows of that 
Law itself? Is there in man’s heart as it were a 


secret intimation of Christ? As for Moses’ Law, 
F 


82 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


says Paul, the word of Grace and the hope of 
Christ preceded it—a triumphant Pauline dis- 
covery (Gal. u.). In all of which, both as to 
the Law and as to the Word of Promise, we see 
Paul tracing something of the outline of that 
hidden Life of Christ in the ages and in the heart 
of man. 


But then again there was something more. For 
Paul is very bold, and says, speaking after the 
manner of a rabbi in Christ: “ All our fathers 
did eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink 
the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that 
spiritual Rock which accompanied them, and 
that Rock was Christ’ (1 Cor. x. 1-3). Here, 
indeed, as we have already remarked, the specific 
purpose is to enforce a warning against certain 
unworthy and magical views of Baptism and the 
Lord’s Supper—to show that no sacrament can 
be unto life which is not partaken of discerningly ; 
but the declaration itself points beyond the 
admonition to a larger truth. 

“All our fathers ”—of the desert-pilgrimage— 
“did eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink 
the same spiritual drink.” For the Lord took 
manna and blessed it and said, Take, eat; this 
is My Body which is for you. In like manner, 
also, after that the rock had been smitten, He 


Christ in Creation and in Man 83 


took of the water and said, This is the new , 
Covenant in My smitten and outpoured life: 
this do as oft as ye drink it in remembrance of 
Me. For so the manna and the water were the 
Lord’s Supper in the wilderness, foreshowing His 
life and His death till He should come. And if 
ever Paul had fully written out his Life of Christ, 
in that mystical and allegorical chapter given over 
to this particular theme should we not have 
found him unsurpassed even by the last and most 
far-horizoned of our four Evangelists—unsur- 
passed as to his teaching concerning that Bread 
from Heaven and that Water of Life, and that 
universal Light, which are the life and sus- 
tenance and illumination of men? For in that 
mystical and allegorical chapter, in which Paul 
would write as a rabbi in Christ, should we not 
read concerning the desert-pilgrimage itself and 
its pilgrims (as we read in Galatians of Mount 
Sinai itself and of Hagar and Sarah) :—‘ which 
things are an allegory,” and as we read in 
Ephesians of the marriage bond :—‘“ This is a 
great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ 
and His Church”? All our fathers of the 
desert-pilgrimage did eat the same spiritual meat 
and did all drink the same spiritual drink; which 
_ things are an allegory and a great mystery; but 
I speak concerning Christ and all the pilgrims of 


84. St. Paul's Life of Christ 


faith in all the ages. For the mystery hid from 
all ages and generations hath now been manifested 
to the saints, to whom God would make known 
what is the riches of the glory of this mystery 
among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the 
hope of glory. 


Finally, if Paul’s Life of Christ had ever been 
fully written out, it seems clear that we should 
have had a great Pauline chapter on the Baptism 
of John, the Forerunner. It seems clear; for 
once and again, in the discourses attributed to 
him in the book of Acts, we find him at pains to 
expound the message and mission of the desert- 
prophet. “ John” (says Paul in the synagogue 
at Pisidian Antioch) “ first preached before His 
coming the baptism of repentance to all the 
people of Israel. And as John fulfilled his course 
he said, Who think ye that [am? Iam not He. 
But behold there cometh One after me whose 
shoes of His feet | am not worthy to unloose.” 
‘“¢ And it came to pass that while Apollos ” (who, 
being instructed in the Way of the Lord, had 
known only the baptism of John) “‘ was at Corinth, 
Paul having passed through the upper country, 
came to Ephesus, and found certain disciples ; 
and he said unto them, Did ye receive the Holy 
Ghost when ye believed? And they said unto 


Christ in Creation and in Man 85 


him, Nay, we did not so much as hear whether 
there be any Holy Ghost. And he said, Into 
what then were ye baptized? And they said, 
Into John’s baptism. And Paul said, John 
baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying 
unto the people, that they should believe on Him 
which should come after him, that is, on Jesus.” 

Thus, far beyond the Judzan borders, even to 
Galatia and to Ephesus, Paul had found the name 
and fame of that Elijah-like prophet potent 
among his fellow-countrymen. Not only had 
John his disciples, who, by their zealous repentance 
and spirituality, were named to Paul for fully 
instructed followers of the Way itself—he had his 
apostles also. For John, being dead, was yet 
speaking. Almost it seemed as if, being dead, 
John had poured out his spirit upon his disciples 
in a baptism as of fire; nevertheless, it was the 
baptism of a fiery law, and not of grace. ‘That 
is what Paul perceived. Living or dead, John 
was always the Law,—the Law touched, as it 
were, with the expectation of grace, but never- 
theless the Law in its austerity and exactingness, 
its fierce anger against all disobedience. He was 
not simply the Law of Moses; he stood for the 
universal Law, so wide were his applications, so 
direct his appeal beyond all ceremonial ordinances 
to the conscience and the heart. 


86 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


It is a disquieting thought that, faced with 
disciples so zealous, so devout and so upright of 
life as those whom Paul first found in Ephesus, 
we ourselves would possibly have detected in 
them no cardinal defect of experience; Paul, 
however, was quick to observe the lack of a certain 
affluence and rest of heart,—a sign that prompted 
the swift and searching inquiry which traced 
their baptism to John and not to Jesus. And 
verily, if John had been able to give them rest, 
he would not have testified of another who should 
come after him; but John, like the Law itself, 
could not give them rest, and this Paul knew 
full well. All that John had ever done, at most, 
for Paul was to shut him up to the faith and 
fulness yet to be revealed. And in all this John 
was a true symbol, not only of the Law, but also 
of all that was prophetic in mankind throughout 
the ages. In John’s message the Eternal Christ 
was as it were leaping in the womb of revelation ; 
but now the fulness of the time had come. 


V 
CHRIST INCARNATE 


1. InTRopuctory.—‘ According to my gospel.” 


According to Paul’s Gospel Christ was mani- 
fested in the flesh, born of woman, of the seed of 
David. ‘That is to say, Paul’s Gospel was at once 
ideal and historical; it was spiritual but not 
spectral; it was embodied. Paul, indeed, was 
resolved to know no man, nor yet Christ Himself, 
simply as flesh and blood. ‘To him it had become 
clear that flesh and blood were of little profit save 
for the uses of the spirit. But then it had that 
profit—that value; and this very truth of the 
supreme importance of knowing Christ not after 
the flesh but after the spirit had been borne in 
upon Paul not in spite of flesh and blood, but by 
means of it. It was because Christ had taken 
upon Him flesh and blood and had died the death 
of flesh and blood that Paul, by his own showing, 
had come to this resolve: ‘‘ For we thus judge, 
that if one died for all, then were all dead; and 
that He died for all . . . wherefore henceforth 
know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we 

87 


88 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


have known Christ after the flesh, yet now hence- 
forth know we Him [so] no more ” (2 Cor. v. 16). 

Even here it is possible, indeed, that some of 
our moods find us remote from the Pauline point 
of view. For is it not occasionally comforting to 
remark that in religion the Idea is everything? 
What though our historical gospels go, does not 
the eternal Idea remain to consecrate the soul of 
man through each successive epoch of progress ? 
Shall we be childishly concerned about dates and 
documents and events of time? Is not Truth 
timeless and spiritual and above all? What 
though our creeded temples fall, have we not an 
house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens? 

These are brave interrogatories, and they do 
us service. Nevertheless, if we sojourn too con- 
tinuously in the region of this Magnetic Pole of 
all our theosophies, shall we not presently find 
the twilight very long, and a certain benumbment 
and torpor overcoming us? And as we turn 
again to the Pauline latitude and climate, are we 
not made aware that here is a world more quick 
and vivid—ruder, stronger, fuller of the heat and 
struggle and triumph of life? 

Shall we not do well if in some of our moods 
we remind ourselves that it is possible to be 
metaphysical overmuch?—that even a_ too- 


Christ Incarnate 89 


metaphysical spirituality itself may conceal an 
incipient atheism and consumption of the soul? 
It is a sickly thing to live too long under the 
moon, or in that twilight zone of faith where 
truth is forever spectral, haunting, as it were, 
the great white silence. 

Friendship is a spiritual thing; but I have a 
friend: shall I not become historical? Shall I 
not declare how he came into my life in my great 
need? how the clasp of his hand brought courage 
to me? how I came to listen for his footfall on 
the gravel path? “I had no rest in my spirit 
because I found not Titus, my brother; but 


taking my leave ... 1 went from thence into 
Macedonia.’’—** And when we were come into 
Macedonia our flesh had no rest. ... Never- 


theless God, that comforteth those that are cast 
down, comforted us by the coming of Titus.” 
Shall we sublimate this Pauline record, dis- 
solving ‘Titus into ethereal elements and con- 
serving only the Pauline experience of comfort 
and a certain elusive and abstract sense of 
comradeship? And so with Paul’s greater Friend? 


But then, again, as to our approach to Paul’s 
Gospel, we of to-day are conscious of a certain 
shifting even of evangelical emphasis. ‘‘ God 
was in Christ reconciling the world unto Him- 


go St. Paul's Life of Christ 


self.” That declaration in itself is indeed a 
sanctuary wherein all devout hearts may worship. 
But how would we interpret it? Are there not 
times when we handle the Pauline instruments 
as one would handle the fossil tools of a buried 
civilization ? 

The viewless electric energy which from the 
beginning has been thrilling through the earth 
and the firmament, visible in fitful flashes in the 
summer sky, but elusive, uncomprehended, is at 
length caught within delicate filaments and given 
a constant epiphany, fixed, orb-like, effulgent, to 
enlighten the darkness of the earth. So shall it 
satisfy us to say that the divine energies of truth 
and grace, active throughout the ages, but un- 
comprehended—flashing in the firmament of 
prophecy only to vanish again into viewless 
mystery—shall we say that in Jesus, caught, as 
it were in the quivering filaments of His soul, 
those energies at last became fixed, luminous, 
and manifest to all? This is no mean faith to 
set forth, but it falls short of Paul’s Gospel in one 
vital particular which for him sharpened and 
heightened every detail of Christ’s earthly 
ministry: it leaves us with no clear sense of 
Christ’s pre-existence, and thus of His voluntary 
condescension and grace. 

It is open to us all to recognize that the Pauline 


Christ Incarnate gl 


conception of Christ, in His pre-existence as the 
eternal Son, in His ideal, archetypal humanity as 
the Heavenly Man, and in His voluntary self- 
abasement as made in the likeness of sinful flesh, 
had for Paul supreme moral and evangelical 
value. It is open to us to recognise that to make 
Christ’s Bethlehem birth the upspringing out of 
the unconscious of a life which had no antecedent 
being and therefore no elective purpose, no will- 
to-be, until it fashioned that will out of its own 
infant appetites, would be to take all the colour 
out of Paul’s Gospel ; 1t would muffle the majestic 
organ-tones of Grace which accompany and 
interpret the entire recitative of Paul’s narration 
of Christ’s earthly ministry; it would deprive us 
of the glow and rapture of a redemption wrought 
for us at infinite cost by One who, though He 
was rich, for our sakes became poor. 

Fach age, it is true, must read the stars for 
itself: and it may be that there are discoveries 
to be made in periods of occultation and eclipse 
which can be made at no other time. We must 
be true to our light, true even to our dimness 
of light. But above all our dimness and vexation, 
our questionings and dubieties, does not Paul’s 
Christ, clearer, surer, more sublime than all our 
thought of Him, look down upon us with His 
own starry eyes of pity and of grace? 


92 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


2. ** In FASHION AS A Mavn.”’ 


From the day when Paul heard a Voice speaking 
to him in the Hebrew tongue out of the excellent 
glory and saying “JI am Fesus” he began to 
understand not only that He who thus called 
to him was a man (he had believed that before 
he had well believed anything else concerning 
Jesus), but also that He was The Man, the Man 
from Heaven, the One in whom humanity was 
original, authentic, complete. Earthly man was 
in the image of God; in the Heavenly Man the 
image was fulfilled unto the very Form of God. 
But then also it was clear to him that Jesus in 
the days of His flesh had been found in fashion 
not as The Man, the Lord of Glory, but as a 
man in all things like unto His brethren. And 
thus at the outset, as we may believe, Paul found 
in his hands the clue to the grace of the Lord 
Jesus Christ. So that there was nothing more 
to Paul’s mind than the thought that when, in 
the fulness of the time, Christ was manifested, 
He was manifested as one born of woman, born 
under the Law. Not all the works of wonder 
which they told of Christ who had been eye- 
witnesses of His ministry were nearly so much 
to Paul’s mind as the wonder of Christ Himself 
in His self-emptying humility and identification 


Christ Incarnate 93 


with His brethren. For not only did He not 
take upon Him the nature of angels, He took not 
upon Him, either, the fashion of human perfect- 
ness, but was found “in the likeness of the flesh 
of sin.” ‘There was the wonder that He had not 
flashed upon men in His “ body of Glory,”’ whose 
brightness Paul had beheld for one blinding 
instant on the Damascus road, but that He had 
taken upon him the fashion of sinful mortality, 
a body that could be broken and crucified, that 
could bleed and die. Concerning which there is 
no more Pauline passage to be found than that 
which was addressed to the Hebrews by Paul’s 
unknown disciple: ‘‘ For it became Him, for 
whom are all things and through whom are all 
things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to 
make the Author of their salvation perfect 
through sufferings. . . . For verily not of angels 
doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the 
seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behoved Him in 
all things to be made like unto His brethren” 
(Heb. ii. 10, 17). All this that unknown disciple 
may have heard many a time from Paul himself 
in his prayers and in his discourses and in his 
reasonings with his own countrymen. “ For,” 
says Chrysostom, “‘it is necessary for us to speak 
of the scope of Paul and his mind, which one may 


find everywhere shining forth... . What then 


94 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


is Paul’s mind and what is his custom?... 
Having once taken hold of our Lord’s Flesh, he 
freely thereafter uses all the sayings that humiliate 
Him; without fear, as though that were able to 
bear all such expressions.” * 

So He was “ born of a woman, born under the 
Law.” Only, as Paul seems to suggest to us, 
He was the Child of the Ages also. All time was 
His mother, all history pregnant with Him. It 
was “in the fulness of the time ” that He came. 
Not nine moons back was the beginning of that 
holy conception. What the starry night at 
Bethlehem witnessed was the travail of the ages. 


3. ‘° HumBiep.” 


Perhaps, then, it would not be too much to 
say of Paul in Arabia, receiving of the Lord that 
which later he was to deliver unto men, and in 
Tarsus, returned to his own people, and in Judza, 
treated by his familiar friends as a heathen man 
and a publican, that no thought was oftener in 
his mind concerning Jesus Christ than this—that 
‘“* He humbled Himself.”’ For as for Paul himself, 
it was by nature very hard for him to humble 
himself. It was hard for him to empty himself 
of those prerogatives and of that prestige which 
were his as a man of birth and education, as a 


* Chrysostom: Homil. 1 Cor. (xxxix). 


Christ Incarnate 95 


man of high standing, both as a Jew and as a 
Roman. We know that, by the grace of God, he 
did come into his own great kenosis ; yet to the | 
end of his days Paul’s kenosis was incomplete. It 
is plain to see that Paul had a constant struggle 
with himself in the matter of humility, and that 
long after his conversion it went hard with him 
to endure contradiction with meekness and con- 
tumely with submission. (“‘ And the high priest 
Ananias commanded them that stood by him to 
smite him on the mouth. Then said Paul unto 
him: God shall smite thee, thou whited wall ! ”’) 
So that it may be said of those always-unfinished 
chapters of Paul’s Life of Christ that there was 
none to which he would return with so heart- 
searching a sense of his own insufficiency as to that 
chapter which set forth how Christ humbled 
Himself. 


Christ, Paul would show, humbled Himself by 
His very birth, appearing amongst men not in 
“the body of His Glory,” but in a body of 
humiliation. Paul’s own body of humiliation was 
constantly expounding to him his Master’s great 
humility. It was always, perhaps, something of 
a trial to Paul’s natural pride of spirit that— 
unlike his royal namesake—his own bodily presence 
was unimpressive. For ‘his letters,” said his 


96 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


traducers, “‘are weighty and strong; but his 
bodily presence is weak, and his delivery of no 
account.” In a manner of speaking, Paul was 
without form or comeliness. He knew that men 
were saying as much and more; and we can see, 
perhaps, the deepening of his colour at the thought 
of it (2 Cor. x. 10). But then Christ had humbled 
Himself to wear just such a body as Paul’s. The 
outward Paul (2 Cor. v. 6) which was slowly 
decaying, and the outward Jesus which knew 
hunger and exhaustion and pain and death, 
were both in the likeness of ungodlike, sinful 


flesh. 


It must, also, have been in Paul’s eyes no other 
than a great and beautiful humility that, like 
himself, his Lord should once have thought as a 
child and felt as a child, and as a child should 
have been taken up with childish things. It 
would never have been to Paul’s mind to embellish 
those childish years with traditions of miraculous 
prescience and magical power. No fabled wonder- 
stories of those Nazareth years would he ever 
have permitted Luke to set in store for inclusion 
in that gospel which he had it in mind to write 
—nothing that would have shown Jesus, with all 
His gifts of heart and mind, as doing other than 
thinking and speaking as the Holy Child He was, 


Christ Incarnate 97 


and as being subject to His parents. For so did 
He humble Himself. 

Jesus’ very upbringing, too, in such a town as 
Nazareth must have appeared to Paul as part of 
his Lord’s humbling of Himself. Paul’s own 
birth and childhood in the great city of Tarsus 
and his upbringing in the still greater city of 
Jerusalem served to fling into bolder relief the 
humility of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and His 
upbringing in Nazareth. 


But all this was only the beginning of Christ’s 
humbling of Himself. ‘There was, as He grew 
into man’s estate, the daily contradiction of 
sinners which He endured. As Paul’s unknown 
disciple hath it, and as Paul himself must often 
have said to his sorely-tried elders and evan- 
gelists: ‘“‘ Consider Him that hath endured such 
contradiction of sinners”’—such hostility from 
sinful men—‘“‘so as to keep your own hearts 
from} daintme: and \-failinge *’..(tHeb.| xu. 37:4 see 
Moffatt). And in this matter, as in almost all 
others, Paul’s own life was constantly interpreting 
to him the life of Christ. All the contradiction 
which Paul endured from the Synagogue and 
from the Sanhedrin, and even from his fellow- 
_ labourers and apostles, served to send him with 


new eyes to the record of what his Lord went 
G 


98 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


through. Even Paul’s sharp contention with 
Peter, the Lord’s own companion and apostle, 
and with James, the Lord’s own brother, helped 
to show him how much contradiction, how much 
narrowness and blindness, the Lord had humbled 
Himself to endure from day to day, not alone 
from His enemies, but also from His friends. 
There were times, indeed, as we have already 
seen, when it seemed as if in this matter he were 
almost re-living the life of Christ: and this not 
only in the contradiction which, like his Master, 
he endured from the Pharisees and from the 
Sadducees and from false brethren, but in his 
having, like his Master, to bare his back to the 
smiters, and in his having at last, hke Him whom 
all forsook, to tread the winepress alone. For 
‘at my first answer no man stood with me, but 
all men forsook me.” 


And this is the place for us to note, moreover, 
that Paul, in his great portrait of Jesus Christ in 
His humility and humiliation, has a bold and 
vivid line in which he shows Him “in the form 
of a servant.” And here, too, it must have been 
no light thing for Paul, being such a man as he 
- was, to have added that line. With Saul of 
Jerusalem it must have been a thing incredible 


that God’s Messiah should so humble himself; 


Christ Incarnate 99 


and even for Paul the believer it must at first 
have been a strange, dark doctrine to be pondered 
in Arabia not without rebellion of heart. Yet 
so it was. Cesar in triumphal state was not 
more evidently in the form of a god than Jesus 
Christ was in the form of a servant. 

He was in the form of a servant when He learned 
His trade in Nazareth and laboured at it, and 
took His orders for this and for that and carried 
them out. Young Jesus bending to His trade 
(was it as a builder, “‘ turning stones into bread”? ?), 
taking His orders from His father Joseph, and 
taking them, too, from exacting and voluble 
customers or employers, who must be served to 
a nicety and have things thus and so—Paul, who 
had himself learned a trade and followed it knew 
something of what all that could mean 

But then he also knew that in all this Jesus 
wore no more than the outward form of a servant ; 
he knew that all these things were no more than 
a shadow and parable of something more meaning- 
ful and more searching by far. As also when, 
the same night in which He was betrayed, Jesus, 
knowing that the Father had given all things 
into His hands and that He came forth from God 
and goeth unto God, riseth from Supper and 
layeth aside His garments; and He took a towel 
and girded Himself: then He poureth water into 


100 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


the basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, 
and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He 
was girded :—this, too, was a shadow whereof 
the substance was something more inward and 
spiritual. And this inner substance it was into 
which Paul throughout his believing years was 
penetrating; namely, how the Son of Man was 
in the world, not as the kings of the Gentiles, 
who exercise lordship, but as one that serveth, 
and how in that form of a bondservant He gave 
His life to ransom them that were bound. For 
Paul came to see that that form of a servant which 
Christ took upon Himself was none other than 
the form of the Suffering Servant of God who 
was oppressed, and who humbled himself, and 
was as a lamb led to the slaughter, and was 
numbered with the transgressors, and bare the 
sin of many. 

This Paul had to see and feel for himself; but 
having so seen and so felt, he, whose way it had 
been to carry himself high among men, could 
presently write to a handful of slaves and nonde- 
scripts: “Though I be free from all, yet have I 
made myself servant unto all ”—“‘ For we preach 
not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and 
ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.” And so 
to the end, by likeness and by contrast of experi- 
ence, Paul continued to search the depths of his 


Christ Incarnate IOI 


Master’s abasement; even to the time when, 
despised and cast out as “ the filth and offscouring 
of the earth,” he came to see with deepening 
insight how Christ was “‘ made to be sin for us ”’ ; 
and until at last, being such an one as Paul the 
aged, he stretched forth his hands, and another 
girded him and led him to where he knelt and 
bowed his head to the sword. In that moment 
the last crimson line was written in Paul’s never- 
finished chapter on the Humiliation of Christ. 


4. OBEDIENT. 


‘“‘He became obedient,” says Paul, summing 
up his Master’s life in another penetrative, and, 
so far as the New Testament is concerned, almost 
exclusively Pauline word. And beyond question 
that word was deep-rooted in Paul’s mind from 
the first. Humility may have been a word sown 
in Paul’s mind and nature only in his later and 
evangelical years; but obedience was as much a 
Sauline as a Pauline word. It was with him in 
all his blameless observance of the Law and the 
traditions of the fathers; with him, too, we may 
well believe, in all his fierce persecution of the 
intractable followers of the Way; and it remained 
with him, to take on a new and deeper meaning, 
~when the Damascus road suddenly opened into 
that same Way, with Saul himself taking his first 


102 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


halting pilgrim-steps upon it. Small wonder, 
then, that in Paul’s great summary of the Life 
of Christ we find this word taking a conspicuous 
place: for with all natures which, like Paul’s, 
were punctual in discipline and given to authority, 
the obedience and discipline of Christ were some- 
thing to be noted immediately and memorably. 
(Does not this in some measure account for that 
spontaneous understanding and freemasonry of 
spirit which seems to have sprung up between 
Jesus and certain of the military and civic officers 


of the Gospel records ?) 


For a beginning, then—Jesus was obedient to 
the Law of Moses. He was, as Paul says, born 
under the Law. And the first commandment 
of that Law to which He learned obedience was 
that commandment with promise which Paul was 
afterwards forward to enjoin upon all children in 
the Lord: ‘‘ Honour thy father and thy mother, 
that thy days may be long in the land which the 
Lord thy God giveth thee.” No father and 
mother were ever so honoured by their children’s 
obedience as Joseph and Mary were honoured by. 
the obedience of Jesus Christ. 

Jesus Christ grew up to obey the Law of Moses 
with such an obedience as gave to the Law itself 
a new height and depth of meaning and of 


Christ Incarnate 103 


promise. Paul’s obedience had been outwardly 
blameless; but Christ’s obedience had been ~ 
transforming—transforming in respect of the 
Law itself. For Jesus obeyed the Law of Moses 
as a master musician follows the scant score of 
some ancient melody. Where the mere executant 
with mechanic accuracy goes through his blameless 
performance—in danger, perhaps, in his dull 
correctitude, of reading into the score the specks 
and stains which time has added to the sheet— 
the master will bring out the hidden movement, 
the true motif, and carry it forward to a climax 
which only his touch can bring out. So Christ 
obeyed the Law. He fulfilled it—filled it 
out. 

_ Jesus Christ, according to Paul, so obeyed the 
Law of Moses as to end it as a merely racial and 
ceremonial code, and liberate it as a spiritual 
force. Christ, says he, is the end of the Law 
unto righteousness (Rom. x. 4). He so obeyed 
it that for those who followed Him all that was 
local and transient in it fell away, with all like- 
wise that was condemnatory and destructive, 
while all in it that was timeless and universal and 
exalting was conserved and everlastingly estab- 
lished: ‘‘that the righteousness of the Law 
might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the 
flesh, but after the Spirit ” (Rom. vill. 4). 


104 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


For within and beyond the Law of Moses 
which Jesus Christ so honoured and obeyed, 
was the Law of God; and if for the Jews, in 
their mechanic obedience, these two were identi- 
cal, for Jesus Christ, in His spiritual obedience, 
they were not identical. For not only did He 
distinguish between Moses’ precepts and the web 
of tradition spun around them out of the spider- 
brains of the legal casuists; He also distinguished 
between Moses’ precepts and the eternal prin- 
ciples of sovereign righteousness which they 
interpreted. It belonged, indeed, to His very 
honouring and obeying of Moses’ Law that He 
should recognize as still higher the original and 
absolute and still-unfolding Law of God. He 
could not have honoured Moses’ Law so well, had 
He not honoured that higher Law still more. 
For He never summoned men, as His ecclesiastical 
opponents were wont to do, to yield a blind 
obedience to the ancient letter, but rather to 
yield an obedience that was intelligent and dis- 
cerning. He taught men to mark where Moses’ 
code was an accommodation to a hard and sapless 
age (Mark x. 4), and to look, therefore, in their 
spiritual obedience beyond Moses’ precepts to 
eternal principles. He taught them to regard 
the Law not only as an institution but as a 
prophecy, a promise of that which was to come. 


Christ Incarnate 105 


All this, through much study and prayer, in 
his musings on ship-board during his missionary 
wanderings, and at the camp-fires while his 
companions slept, and in his disputings with his 
legal-minded fellow-countrymen, Paul had to see 
for himself: so that presently he could set down 
the wonder of Christ’s obedience, so profound, so 
spiritual, so transforming, side by side with the 
wonder of His coming in the likeness of men. 
His becoming a man like unto His brethren and 
His becoming obedient with an obedience which 
so far surpassed, in its character and in its fruits, 
that of His brethren—these two things Paul set 
down together (Phil. i. 8) 


But then He was obedient in a still deeper and 
more particular sense. He was obedient not only 
to the Law of Moses and to the Law of God after 


which it was patterned, but also to the specific, : 


particular will of God in relation to His own life 
and ministry. Here indeed was the very flower 
and perfectness of the obedience of Christ, as 
something personal, filial, intimate, minute. ‘The 
will of God was something more personal and 
intimate than the Law of God: and of this Paul 
himself knew something by his own experience. 
For with Paul himself, besides the general Law 
of God and of Christ, there was the heavenly 


Me 


106 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


vision, specifically for himself, and the vocation 
which grew out of it, and the inner, mystic 
guidance which continually interpreted to him 
the outworking of that vision: and Paul well 
understood that the extreme test of his own 
obedience lay in these particulars. 

So the supreme significance of Christ’s life, 
and, above all, of His death, lay in this—that His 
life and death were not only in conformity with 
the Law of God, but were expressly and par- 
ticularly the carrying out of the will of God 
concerning Jesus Christ Himself; His obedience 
was the outworking of His own heavenly vision 
and heavenly vocation: and from the hour that 
that heavenly vision dawned upon Him at His 
first baptism in the Jordan to the hour when it 
was fulfilled in His last and greatest baptism 
beyond Kedron, He was obedient—“ obedient 
even unto death.” 

It was precisely here that Paul, like John, and 
like that Pauline disciple who wrote the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, came into his deepest discoveries. 
Jesus was not more surely led up of the Eternal 
Spirit into the wilderness at the outset of His 


_ ministry than He was led up of that same Spirit 
~* to Calvary at its close. It was His obedience 


which took Him to the Cross, and which argued 
for the Cross a profound and particular signifi- 


Christ Incarnate 107 


cance. It was not the Law of Moses which laid 
upon Him the necessity of submitting to it, nor 
yet the general, universal Law of God: it was 
the will of the Father, the commandment which 
He had received of Him. 

For when presently in Paul’s case, also, the 
net of ecclesiastical and political conspiracy was 
drawn close, and he found himself set, like his 
Master, on his defence, Paul felt no such necessity 
laid upon him; quite otherwise. “ But Paul 
said, I am standing before Cezsar’s judgment- 
seat, where I ought to be judged: to the Jews 
have I done no wrong, as thou very well knowest. 
If I am a wrongdoer and have committed any- 
thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but 
if none of those things is true whereof these accuse 
me, no man can giveme up untothem. [I appeal 
unto Cesar.” 

In all this, we may believe, Paul was obedient. 
Neither the Law of Moses nor the Law of God, 
nor yet that heavenly vision by which he lived, 
laid it upon him to do other than he did that day. 
And therefore, it may be, there flashed upon him 
that day not alone a new sense of his Master’s 
humiliation, who had no title to carry His debased 
and unknown name to the tribunal of the lord 
of all the earth, but also a new sense of that 
special and particular obedience to His Father’s 


108 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


will which led Him to submit to His unjust death. 
Could not He, too, have said to His judge: “ To 
the Jews have I done no wrong, as thou very well 
knowest ”? Could not He, too, have said: 
“‘ If I am a wrongdoer and have committed any- 
thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die,” but 
if not, ‘no man can give Me up unto them”? 
But He was ready to be offered up; and that 
commandment He had received of His Father. 
For being found in fashion as a man, He humbled 
Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, 
yea, the death of the cross. 


5. DLEmpren. 


In all this, also, Paul came to see that Jesus 
Christ was continually under self-discipline. 
“¢ Certainly,” says he, ‘‘ Christ pleased not Him- 
self’? (Rom. xv. 3)—in that declaration laying 
bare the truth of the probation and inward 
conflict of the Son of Man. With such a self to 
please, would not self-pleasing for once have 
become a beautiful and godlike thing? But 
certainly, says Paul, He lived by no such rule. 
Certainly He bore within Him a self whose 
impulses and desires were the stuff of life with 
which He had to work, but which He would not 
use save to cast it upon the loom of that cross 


which He daily took up and on which He wove 


Christ Incarnate 109 


those impulses and desires into the perfect 
pattern of His Father’s design. 

In all things wherein Jesus suffered reproach 
and contumely and pain He pleased not Himself. 
There was that in Him which shrank from these 
things and desired other and far different things ; 
and these other and different things also were 
within His grasp, and only by stern self-discipline 
did He renounce them. To say this is to set 
forth Jesus in His temptations. For a man is 
tempted when He is drawn away of his own 
desires and enticed; and Christ also, Paul will 
have us remember, knew the urgings of that self 
without which there can be no moral life, and 
which, undisciplined, must lead to its destruction. 

What Paul himself has in mind when he makes 
this declaration he plainly shows us. He has in 
mind the 69th Psalm. “ For Christ also pleased 
not Himself; but as it is written, ‘ The reproaches 
of them that reproached Thee fell upon me.’ 
For whatsoever things were written aforetime 
were written for our learning, that through 
patience and comfort of the Scriptures we might 
have hope.” Paul has this scripture in mind, 
and whatever he had heard or read of Jesus’ 
temptation in the desert or His strong cryings and 
tears on the hillside and in the Garden and upon 
the Cross, those things he sees again, more vividly, 


IIO St. Paul's Life of Christ 


it may be, than in any gospel-picture, in the 


69th Psalm— 


Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul. 
I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing : 
I am come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. 


Let not them that wait on Thee be ashamed through me, 
O Lorp: 

Let not those that seek Thee be brought to dishonour through 
me, O God of Israel. 

Because for Thy sake-I have borne reproach ; 

Shame hath covered my face. 

I am become a stranger unto my brethren, 

And an alien unto my mother’s children. 

For the zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up: 

And the reproaches of them that reproach Thee are fallen 
upon me. 


This is the picture which Paul has in mind 
when he speaks of Christ pleasing not Himself: 
the picture of his Lord in His sorrows and temp- 
tations. 

““T was with wild beasts—and angels,” says 
the Master to Peter one day concerning His 
temptation and illumination in the desert; or 
so we may believe; and when Peter would 
recount the Temptation to John Mark—and 
even, it may have been, to Paul himself when 
Paul “‘ historied ”? him in Jerusalem (Gal. 1. 18)— 
he could think of no better word for it than that 
swift metaphor of Jesus’: He was with wild 
beasts, and ministering angels (Mark i. 13). 


Christ Incarnate rita 


Subtle impulses and desires, stealthy as beasts of 
prey, taking upon them the colour of the innocent 
shadows in which they lurked; heaven-born 
thoughts that came with a waft of angel-wings.... 
But who can fathom the deeps of the loneliness 
and sorrow and reproach of the Son of Man? 


I sink in deep mire where there is no standing : 
I am come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. 


Not Paul himself will fathom those deeps. Only 
he will have us be very sure that beneath the 
deep mire and amid the flood He found this sure 
rock: ‘“‘ Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou 
wilt.” For even Christ pleased not Himself. 


6. Tue Worps or THE Lorp Jesus. 


“I coveted,” says Paul to the Ephesian Elders 
on the beach at Miletus, ‘‘no man’s silver or 
gold or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these 
hands ministered unto my necessities, and to 
them that were with me.” And he continues : 
“In all things I gave you an example, how that 
so labouring ye ought to help the weak, and to 
remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He 
Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to 
receive ~)(Atts xx? 33-36). 

Beyond doubt, during his three years’ ministry 
in Ephesus, Paul had opened to them many 


112 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


another of the sayings of his Master; and yet 
it may be urged that in the discourses and letters 
which have come down to us Paul has surprisingly 
little to say concerning the words of the Lord 
Jesus. It may be urged that we can glean from 
Paul very little of what Jesus ever taught, that 
indeed about Jesus as Teacher he has hardly 
more to say than about Gamaliel. 

However, the length of any disciple’s textual 
quotations from his master may not be the surest 
gauge of that disciple’s devotion to and under- 
standing of his master’s doctrine; there are 
other standards; and when we examine Paul’s 
own teachings we see that he himself has so 
remembered the words of the Lord Jesus as to 
assimilate their very gist and marrow. 

To begin with this saying that ‘‘it is more 
blessed to give than to receive’: we owe it to 
Paul that this saying has come down to us at 
all. He quotes it to his Ephesians as if it were 
one of his choice and much-discoursed-upon texts. 
And what saying could be a better key for the 
opening of the whole doctrine of Jesus as a 
Teacher of men? Luke in his Gospel has a 
saying like unto it, namely, that to give is to 
make sure of receiving (Luke vi. 38), and again 
the plain precept: ‘“‘ Give to every one that 


Christ Incarnate 113 


asketh thee” (verse 30); but Paul’s quotation 
goes deeper. It approximates to those sayings 
of Jesus’ which sharpen truth to the point of 
paradox. The meek inherit more than the 
masterful; the poor are better off than the 
rich; the way to find life is to lose it; giving 
is more blessed than receiving. It is a saying 
which probes experience to the bone; and it 
opens to us, as we have said, the whole doctrine 
(and life) of Jesus. All the blessedness which 
Dives missed and the Good Samaritan found; 
all the blessedness of the widow who cast her 
all into the treasury, and of that irrepressible 
citizen of the New Kingdom who, conscripted to 
travel a mile out of his way, goes striding over 
an extra mile through sheer mirth of invincible 
good will; yea, the blessedness of the Master 
Himself and His approach to life—it is all here. 
All the folly, also, of the hypocrites who would 
find their blessedness not in giving but in being 
seen to give; all the folly of the proud who 
collected salutations and found enlargement in 
the salaams they received, and not in the recog- 
nition they bestowed; all the folly of a pagan 
civilization founded upon exploitation and not 
upon benefaction—upon the lust of exacting 
service, and not upon the rewarding luck of 


giving it—all this, too, is here. With so golden 
H 


114 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


a key as this hanging at Paul’s girdle, all the 
doors of his Master’s teaching were open to 
him. 


Then, again, there is another passage which 
clearly shows to what good purpose Paul had 
remembered the words of the Lord Jesus, extract- 
ing their vital essence—the passage in which he 
sums up the whole Law of Christ. 

Jesus Christ Himself once summed up His law, 
as we recall, in a certain memorable picture. As 
for the picture itself, Paul had known it from 
his childhood. From his childhood he had been 
instructed in the expectation of the Great Judg- 
ment, when the Son of Man should sit on the 
throne of his glory with all his holy angels about 
him, and when all nations, with the dead them- 
selves, summoned up from the vales of Hades, 
should: be gathered before that awful throne. 
Young Saul had often in his mind’s eye beheld 
that picture and imagined that great and final 
parting when, the dooms being pronounced, the 
righteous would enter into life and the wicked 
would go away to the eternal fires reserved for 
the Devil and all his fallen ones. In all these 
things Paul had been instructed from his child- 
hood. But what Saul as a young Pharisee had 
never rightly understood was the principle upon 


Christ Incarnate 115 


which that Great Judgment should proceed. 
For the most part it had been left for him to 
infer that the Judgment would put all good 
Jews and proselytes on the one side and all 
Gentile infidels on the other—all the correct 
and ceremonially clean on the favourable side, 
and all the heretical and unclean on the side of 
final reprobation. However much the contrastive 
colours of that picture might be softened or 
heightened—softened by Gamaliel and his school, 
heightened by the straiter school of Shammai— 
and, moreover, luridly done over and transformed 
by John the Baptist and his school—yet, in the 
main, there seemed no clear discriminating rule 
other than this. 

But Jesus Christ, using that picture for His 
Own great purpose, made it clear that the critical 
test of Judgment Day was not to be a question 
of race, nor of circumcision, nor of ceremonial 
cleanness, nor of the observance of days and 
months and times and years, but that the all- 
deciding question was to be this: Had they put 
their shoulders beneath the common burden? 
Had they supported the weak? Had they fed 
the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, 
succoured the prisoner? Or had they gone their 
own way, bearing no burdens save the burdens 
of their own interests, their own accumulating 


116 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


and self-centred cares? ‘That was the question, 
said the Lord Jesus, summing up His law. 

And Paul, writing to the Galatians, himself 
sums up his Master’s teaching and says: “ Bear 
ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of 
Christ ” (Gal. vi. 2). Ye Galatians, who have 
come to profess so great a concern for the Law 
of Moses and for the works thereof, for feasts 
and fasts, for circumcision, for times and seasons 
—have ye so soon forgotten that your acquittal 
at the Judgment Throne standeth not in these 
things, but ina living faith in Christ your righteous- 
ness? But and if ye must speak of Law, here is 
a law indeed concerning which ye do well to be 
affected, even the Law of Christ Himself: and 
if ye would know what it is, behold I give it you 
in a word: ‘* Bear ye one another’s burdens.” 
Do this, and fulfil the Law of Christ ! 

And after all can we find a word which better 
epitomizes the teachings of Jesus than this 
summary of His Law so easily introduced into 
Paul’s exhortation to the Galatians? Moreover, 
is not Paul remembering the words of the Lord 
Jesus when he says: ‘‘ Bless them that persecute 
you; bless, and curse not’; and when he says: 
‘* Love is the fulfilling of the Law”; and when 
he says: ‘‘ I would have you wise ” (as serpents ?) 
‘‘unto that which is good, and simple” (as 


Christ Incarnate ay: 


doves?) “unto that which is evil”? And in 
many another Pauline word is there not a reminis- 
cent note that carries us back to the Voice of 
Galilee? We have enough, at any rate, to show 
us that in that Life of Christ written upon 
Paul’s heart and mind there must have been a 
chapter on The Words of the Lord Jesus ;— 
“sound words,” says Paul to Timothy, “ even 
the words of our Lord Jesus Christ,’’ concerning 
which if a man consent not unto them, “ he is 
puffed up... knowing nothing” (1 Tim. vi. 


3, 4). ‘ 


7. “‘THey KNEW Him not.” 


“They that dwell in Jerusalem, and their 


rulers,” says Paul, “‘ because they knew Him 
not, nor the voices of the prophets which are 


read every sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning 
Him ” (Acts xi. 27). They knew Him not. » 
And this ignorance and blindness of Paul’s 
own unbelief in time past, and of the continued 
unbelief of his kinsmen according to the flesh, 
whose were the adoption, and the glory, and the 
covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the 
service of God, and the promises; whose were 
the Fathers, also, and of whom was Christ Him- 
self as concerning the flesh—this ignorance and 
blindness of their unbelief was continually excit- 


118 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


ing his sorrow and amazement, so that he carried 
great heaviness and unceasing pain in his heart. 
Looking back upon his own unregenerate years, 
upon the time when he ranked as an expert 
among experts in all things pertaining to the Law 
and the Prophets; looking back upon all the 
discussion concerning Jesus of Nazareth which 
he had engaged in with those that were rabbis 
before him; looking back, it may have been, to 
the times when he himself had looked upon the 
Son of Man—when for a vivid, remembered 
moment, their eyes had met: looking back upon 
all these things, the wonder grew upon him that 
they all should have been so ignorant and so 
blind in their unbelief. “‘ They knew Him not.” 
They knew so much; they were confident that 
they were guides of the blind, lights unto them 
that were in darkness, correctors of the foolish, 
teachers of the simple, having in the Law the 
embodiment of knowledge and of truth : but Him 
they knew not. 

As for Paul and his school, they knew the 
Scriptures. ‘They were word-perfect in them, 
and were zealous to contend for the word- 
perfectness of the Scriptures themselves. ‘They 
knew all that the Prophets had said concerning 
Him, and those same Prophets they read Sabbath 
by Sabbath in the synagogues. ‘They contended 


Christ Incarnate 119 


for the hope of His coming; and it was their line 
of things to be expert in the signs of His approach 
and the manner of His appearing. At the rumour 
of His advent they sought Him out, deputing 
their own authorities to investigate His case; 
in Jerusalem itself their own eyes beheld Him, 
their ears heard Him, their hands handled Him ; 
He taught in their streets and sat at meat in 
their houses; they heard His parables, they 
observed His deeds, they beheld His compassion, 
His ire, His joy, His tears; they saw Him die. 
... But they knew Him not. 


It was not, then, that they were men of nomad 
minds, wandering in far fields of speculation, and 
missing Him in the quest; they held to the Law 
and to the Testimony. It was not that they 
rejected the Prophetic Word; they built upon 
it, elaborating a grandiose scheme. It was not 
that they were careless of faith, lacking gravity 
and a sound discipline; they were rancorous 
against all laxity. It was not that they had no 
religious regard for the Christ of God; they 
reverenced Him as a figure in Holy Writ and 
were prepared to chart and diagram their 
detailed belief in His Person and Ministry. What 
they failed to recognize was that Jesus of Nazareth 
bore any relation to this Scriptural Hope which 


120 St. Paul's Life of Christ 
they had formularized. What they failed to 


recognize was that the movement among the 
hills of Galilee had anything to do with that 
movement in the souls of the holy men of old 
who testified of Messiah. They knew Christ as 
a Scriptural conception; they were blind to 
Him as a contemporary Fact—blind to Him as 
the Initiator at work in the living present. 

As experts, authoritative in their field, they 
thought they knew Him. They had run a 
critical eye over Him and marked His ways. 
They knew Him for an uncredentialled rabbi, 
an upstart innovator, a man slack as to fastings 
and ablutions and such-like godly proprieties, 
a Sabbath-breaker and remover of the ancient 
landmarks of belief, a vain person, a glutton 
and a wine-bibber, an associate of wundesir- 
able folk, a man possessed, a deceiver of the 
people; and the sacred books which testified of 
Him they used to confirm their rejection a 
Him 

And because they knew Him not, they knew 
nothing truly; but all things were veiled to 
them, and a veil was upon their own hearts also. 
They knew not the Scriptures truly, nor the 
Power of God, nor the times in which they 
lived, nor yet themselves and the meaning of 
their own deeds. They lived in a veiled world, 


Christ Incarnate 121 


a world of illusion. Upon the tomb of that 
dead age Paul’s epitaph remains :— 


°C ’THEY KNEW HIM NOT.” 


8. ** SEEN OF ANGELS.”’ 


Christ, says Paul, quoting, as we like to think, 
from an early hymn of the Church, was “ seen 
Srnccisc (i lim-) il. i160), |~ bheres are Locher 
Pauline passages which speak of the relation of 
Christ and His saints with the over-worlds and 
under-worlds of the spirit-realm. These passages 
remind us that the grammar and dialect of faith 
change with changing times. We have to trans- 
late Paul’s idiom into our own terms, and there 
may be times when we have no valid equivalents. 
In such cases it may be well to remember that 
where Paul’s dialect differs from our own, it 
does not follow that it is a less authentic transcript 
of reality. 


Good Master Lawrence, finding his lot cast 
to be out of England during the Cromwellian 
wars, engages himself to write a ‘‘ Treatise of 
Our Communion and Warre with Angells.” * 
Nothing, says he, opening his philosophy, 1s 
made perfect alone. Which is to say that man 
himself must find perfectness not otherwise than 

* Published, 1640. 


122 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


in communion with all the good creatures of 
God. To this end God useth angels, that there 
may be a love and acquaintance grow between 
us. And though now we have not such a visible 
converse with them as formerly, their workings 
dre not ceased. For God useth this Ministration 
and Guardianship of Angels not only for their 
own good and ours, but in particular to preserve 
that Eutaxy and good order which He hath put 
into all things. Moreover, Master Lawrence 
will follow Augustine in holding that the Angels, 
being the highest of all intellectual creatures, 
yet have much that is hidden from them. They 
have a Morning and an Evening knowledge— 
that is to say, a knowledge that is clear and a 
knowledge that is dim. And so through a curious 
and discriminating disquisition. 

No doubt we have long ago forgotten Master 
Lawrence, as we have also forgotten, or generally 
lost sight of, the Angels: in which respect his 
dissertation appeals to us as something quaint 
and naive, a sort of antique metaphysical sampler. 

Yet it does not necessarily follow that ours is 
the superior Divinity. It may even be argued 
that here Master Lawrence’s sense of his citizen- 
ship in the universe is somewhat larger and more 
vivid than our own. And may there not be 
certain overtones and undertones of truth which 


Christ Incarnate 123 


have become inaudible amid the clatter of our 
too mechanical age? Is there no populous 
unseen universe intersphering this visible order 
of things? Or shall Modern Man strut his little 
planet amid the teeming, starry Vast, persuaded 
that he and God are the only intelligences of 
notable sort—or, it may be, himself alone? 

At any rate, Paul, like Master Lawrence, will 
have it otherwise. Paul, too, could have written 
a Treatise of Our Communion and War with 
Angels; and because in Paul’s Life of Christ the 
angels have a place and cannot well be edited 
out of it, we may consider what was his mind, 
also, in this matter. 


Paul had learned to believe in Angels while 
yet he was a child in Tarsus, and had even learned 
to put names upon some of the greater captains 
of the heavenly host—as we put names to the 
stars. As a devout Jew and a Pharisee he con- 
tinued to believe in them; and we may even 
say that as a Christian man and an apostle he 
came to believe in them more vividly and experi- 
mentally. Many things he had come to discard, 
after that great change, but not his faith in an 
unseen world populous with myriad intelligences ; 
many things had been ground to powder beneath 
the weight of that new, mighty Fact, that chief 


124 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


Corner Stone over which he himself had so 
savingly fallen, but not his belief in Angels. 
Indeed they are continually flashing through his 
epistles. 


According to Paul, then, there is a visible 
z| world and there is an invisible world and man 
is related to both. Just as the pond-lily is partly 
| submerged in the water-realm and is rooted in 
| gross elements, but puts forth its leafage on the 
surface and flowers above it, breathing the upper 
air and receiving the influences of sun and sky 
and all the starry firmament, so man lives in two 
realms, rooted as to his physical nature in the 
clay, and lying afloat, as it were, in time, yet 
unfolding here and now in the atmosphere of 
eternity, and receiving nutriment and empower- 
ment of the spiritual universe. Paul will show 
that man on his spiritual side has a capacity for 
communion with God and with his fellow-man ; 
but then also there is an intermediate area of 
communion; he may receive influences from 
supernal beings. ‘The spiritual world as Paul 
conceives it 1s a vast and manifold economy ; 
and human life is related not only downward to 
the lower creation and its cosmic travail, but 
upward to the Most High God and outward to 


occult realms of spiritual existence. 


Christ Incarnate 125 


Moreover, Paul will show that if there are 
supernal influences, there are also influences 
infernal. In the realm invisible and in touch 
with man there are powers that dwell not in 
the light of God; and their guidance is mis- 
guidance. According to Paul, their influence 
comes by way of the dark thoughts and imagina- 
tions of men; and, as he saw it, the world was 
largely under their direction. Sea-craft may not 
travel across country, but they will sail up the 
channels and rivers, penetrating inland in that 
way, following their own element. So in Paul’s 
conception the world was invaded by spirit- 
forces through the spiritual faculties of men; 
and the warfare of the saints was thus to capture 
the thought and imagination of the world, 
holding them for Christ against every dark 
invasion. 

‘“‘However immediately and properly,” says 
Master Lawrence, “the Devil may concur in 
the point of temptation, yet he ever concurs 
remotely . . . for between the temptation of the 
Devil and sin there ever mediates, and goes 
between, cogitation or thought, in which the 
temptation properly and formally lies.”” So that, 
as for our Adversary, we must “set him up for 
a Butt to shoot against, but in our confession 
charge only ourselves.” ‘The weapons of our 


126 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


warfare,” says Paul, “are not of the flesh, but 
mighty before God to the casting down of strong- 
holds; casting down imaginations and every high 
thing that is exalted against the knowledge of 
God, and bringing every thought into captivity 
to the obedience of Christ’? (2 Cor. x. 4, 5). 
“For we have to struggle, not with blood and 
flesh, but with the angelic Rulers, the angelic 
Authorities, the potentates of the dark present, 
the spirit-forces of evil in the heavenly sphere ” 
(Eph. vi. 12: Moffatt). 

Doubtless, morbid superstition, both primitive 
and modern, at work on this same borderland of 
experience, has wrought evil in the earth. In 
place of angels we have banal ghosts; in place 
of errant spirits—in the braver Hebrew thought 
the fallen offspring of the Highest, and with 
that ineradicable kinship always to be reckoned 
with—we have the progeny of creative Evil, 
dark witnesses to a Dualism in which the universe 
appears as a house for ever divided against itself. 
Here indeed is no Eutaxy as Master Lawrence 
hath it, but hopeless Ataxy and moral chaos. 
But this is hardly Paul’s doctrine, which is 
grounded upon the creative and providential 
sovereignty of God. As to the powers of dark- 
ness, says our Pauline essayist, they are not the 
rulers of the world—“ that is God’s territory ”— 


Christ Incarnate rey 


but of the moral darkness thereof. (“‘ When ye 
are in the dark, the spirit of darkness is bold with 
you.”) And for the rest: “ God created them,” 
and, “He hath a hand over them still. They 
cannot break loose nor get beyond their Tether ” ; 
and, ‘“‘ God knows how to improve every creature,” 
and He made nothing in vain. And thus bravely 
to the conclusion, namely, That it illustrates the 
divine goodness and bounty rather to bring 
greater good out of evil than to permit no evil 
at all—‘‘ else no evil would befall.”” In which, 
we may take it, Paul would have concurred. 


And all this we have glanced at because Paul’s 
conception of the life of Christ and Paul’s con- 
ception of the world in which that life was lived 
belong together. To think of that world as a 
very small one and of that life as having been 
lived in a corner must always be possible. ‘The 
obscure province—the uncredentialled Rabbi— 
the evanescent popularity—the quibbling sectaries 
—the tumult in the ancient city—the soon 
unheeded cross :—what was it all but a storm 
on an inland lake, with its shrill winds, its land- 
locked surge, its little nameless ships—all so 
local, so pathetically vivid, so little noticed? It 
is always possible to paint the picture so. 

But it was not possible for Paul. He must 


128 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


have the living universe for his background. He 
must have men see the Life of Christ as central 
and crucial to the whole movement of things, 
supernal and infernal, divine and human. Christ 
was “‘ seen of angels,” and, for His sake, so, too, 
were His apostles after Him: “ We are made a 
spectacle to the world—to angels and to men” 
(1 Cor. iv. 9). For Paul, the life of Christ was 
a life which throbbed from the centre to the 
uttermost circumference of things: its conflict 
was far-flung throughout the visible and invisible 
realms, its issues involved the whole universe of 
God. So, on the night on which He was be- 
trayed, when the lanterns flashed among the 
olives, and on that still darker morrow when 
three crosses crowned the hill, something was 
being wrought out which was for all the ages 
and all the worlds. Paul learned to see the 
Son of God on Calvary challenging and cutting 
off all the malign powers of the Unseen and 
triumphing over them (Col. ii. 15); he learned 
to see that the conflict and victory of Christ’s 
Cross were not for man only, nor for this earth 
alone, but reached out unto the reconciliation 


of all things (Col. i. 20). 


Shall we of to-day find ourselves long content 
with a meaner view of history and of life, and of 


Christ Incarnate 129 


that supreme Sorrow and Triumph which have 
consecrated all history and all life? Does not 
Science itself take up the parable, and tell us 
that every blow of the hammer upon the nails 
of the Cross sent a tremor to the stars? 


g. THe Lorp’s Supper. 


“‘T received of the Lord,” says Paul, ‘ that 
which also I delivered unto you, how that the 
Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed 
took bread; and when He had given thanks, 
He brake it, and said, This is My body, which 
is for you: this do in remembrance of Me. In 
like manner also the cup after Supper, saying, 
This cup is the new covenant in My blood: 
this do, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of 
Me” (a Cor. xi. 23-25). 

It is hardly to be challenged that, under 
Christ, we owe the Lord’s Supper supremely to 
Paul, to his insight and mystical imagination. 
What original motive and urgency led him, as 
bishop of the Gentile churches, to turn to the 
tradition of the Supper and make it the subject 
of such intense and inquiring meditation 1s a 
question which they must discuss who are com- 
petent to do so. But what seems sufficiently 
clear is, that the Supper came at length to take 


so demanding a place in Paul’s mind, and to 
I 


130 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


meet so deep a need in the minds of his Gentile 
converts, that he had no rest in his spirit until 
he had sought to learn directly of the Lord 
Himself how he ought to think of it. For shall 
we do well to reduce his “I received of the 
Lord ” to the value of “‘ I received of tradition ”’ ? 
Paul, being such a man as he was, with so intense 
and psychical a nature, and having had such 
experiences of vision and intromission as we read 
of in his epistles, may here be understood to 
mean no less than he appears to say. Intense 
and prayerful meditation upon all he had ever 
learned concerning that Last Supper brought 
Paul, we may well believe, into that state of 
high and mystical consciousness which his language 
here suggests. 


For Paul, then, with this tradition before him 
and with this mystical opening and heavenly 
confirmation sealing it into him afresh, the 
Lord’s Supper was Christ’s Cross and Passion 
interpreted by Christ Himself. At the Supper 
the Lord Jesus had rehearsed Calvary. At the 
Supper, and in the very hour of His Passion, He 
had set forth His own mind concerning His death. 
The broken bread and the wine poured forth were 
the visible metaphors which, by swift election, 
He chose in that hour to reveal His thought. 


Christ Incarnate 131 


Assured of this, Paul had now in his hands a 
clue to the Cross and to all the prophecies of the 
Cross. Not one of those who were apostles 
before him and had received the bread from the 
Lord Himself, and the cup still warm from His 
hands who had held it and blessed it—not one 
of them could instruct Paul as this ordinance 
now instructed him. It took him back to the 
Upper Room; it made him as if he too had 
been an eye-witness and partaker of that solemn 
feast; but then it did much more. For it was 
not with the outward showing of that new and 
Christian Passover that Paul was concerned so 
much as with its innermost meaning. And the 
Lord’s Supper told Paul that the Lord Jesus 
went that night into the darkness of His betrayal 
and arrest with a great light shining in His soul. 
It told Paul that Jesus went forth knowing that 
His sacrifice was to be as bread and wine for the 
souls of men, and that, so knowing, He gave 
thanks. It told him that his Master went forth 
with the vows of God upon Him to ratify the 
new Covenant of the Most High. It told him 
that in all that befell that night on which the 
Lord was betrayed, and on that morrow of 
suffering and shame, Jesus Christ knew Himself 
to be in the hands, not of Caiaphas nor of Herod 
nor of Pilate, but of God, and secure in the 


[Re St. Paul's Life of Christ 


outworking of His Covenant-purpose for man- 
kind. For by one offering He perfected for ever 
them that are sanctified, even as it is written: 
This is the Covenant that I will make with 
them after those days, saith the Lord; I will 
put My laws on their heart, and upon their mind 
also will I write them; and their sins and their 
iniquities will I remember no more. 


Once, then, that Paul felt fully assured that 
he had the mind of the Lord concerning the Holy 
Feast, he set it to the fore in all the churches 
committed to his care. (Was it not in his dis- 
course at the Lord’s ‘Table in that many-lighted 
and crowded upper room in ‘Troas that Paul, so 
caught up in his theme, forgot the passing of the 
hours and “continued his speech until mid- 
night ? ’’) 

No one indeed could well have been less 
sacramentarian than this Apostle of Uncircum- 
cision who will even thank God that he has 
“baptized nobody.” He well understands how 
the simplest of symbols, wrested to schismatic 
or superstitious ends, can frustrate the purpose 
it is meant to serve. He is forward to show that 
the mere act either of baptism or of partaking 
of the Supper can never of itself secure spiritual 
grace or Divine favour. ‘The sacraments in the 


Christ Incarnate 133 


Wilderness, he points out, had no magical efficacy 
for those who partook of them—a fact, says he, 
recorded for our warning. ‘“ Our fathers were 
all baptized unto Moses in the Cloud and in 
the sea, and did all eat the same spiritual meat, 
and did all drink the same spiritual drink... . 
But with many of them God was not well pleased ; 
for they were overthrown in the wilderness ”’ 
(1 Cor. x. 1-6). Moreover, it would not be 
a forced enlargement of Paul’s own declaration 
concerning his mission to say that he came, not 
to administer sacraments, but to proclaim the 
Gospel. Yet the Supper is a holy mystery, 
witnessing not only to Christ in His humiliation, 
but to His present exaltation. For is it not 
evident that Paul makes of it something more 
than a memorial; something more than a means 
of fellowship in sacred memories and in a sacred 
hope? Does it not appear as if in his eyes the 
bread and the wine themselves possessed a certain 
potency—as if the symbols themselves came to 
be touched with a living mystery, so that to 
partake of them unworthily was to run the risk 
of illness and death? ‘“‘ Anyone who eats the 
loaf or drinks the cup of the Lord carelessly will 
have to answer for a sin against the body and 
blood of the Lord. . .. For he who eats and 
drinks without a proper sense of the Body, eats 


134 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


and drinks to his own condemnation. ‘That is 
why many of you are ill and infirm, and a number 
even dead” (1 Cor. xi. 27-30: Moffatt). 

We have to imagine Paul at Communion. © 
For so vivid and experiencing a nature, so quick 
an imagination, so mystical a spirit, how could 
the symbols of the Holy Feast have seemed other 
than luminous and ineffable, involved in the 
radiant mystery of the real Presence? To read 
Gal. i. and 2 Cor. xii. and Romans vii. and vii., 
and then to imagine Paul at Communion, is 
to feel that for him, in those tense moments of 
adoring silence, the bread and the cup may well 
have blent with, and mystically passed into, the 
spiritual glory which they symbolized. How 
could Paul ever take of that bread and that cup 
without discerning the Body and Blood of the 
Lord? And how could he contemplate any 
careless, unworthy handling of those symbols 
without feeling it was an act of dishonour not 
wholly unlike theirs who, in the days of Christ’s 
flesh, handled undiscerningly and guiltily the 
body of the Son of Man? 


10. THE Goop ConFEssion BEFORE PiLatTe. 

“‘T charge thee ”—runs the apostolic admoni- 
tion to Timothy, “in the sight of God, who 
quickeneth all things, and of Christ Jesus, who 


Christ Incarnate Lee 


before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confes- 
taut toa eal Ga Me Bia a yg la Be 

Paul’s beloved physician has drawn for us the 
picture of Jesus as the meek captive in the hands 
of His enemies, and has shown us how the whole 
company of His accusers rose up and brought 
Him to Pilate, and how He witnessed so good a 
confession that Pilate must needs say, ‘‘ I find no 
fault in this man.” Luke indeed leaves us with 
the impression that Jesus’ witness before Pilate 
that day was not nearly so much in uttered word 
as in something which speech could neither express 
nor describe. But if we are to take this charge 
in First ‘Timothy as reflecting Paul’s own thought 
—a fragment of that Life of Christ upon which 
he was continually drawing—we may judge that 
Paul would have emphasized, even more than 
Luke has done, the spiritual and inexpressible 
nature of that good confession. 

For we know enough of Paul’s mind to under- 
stand that he would have us mark the wonder 
of it that Jesus, arraigned before Czsar’s man, 
should have been content to stand thus at the 
bar at all. Paul would have us remember that 
it was Christ Jesus who was so arraigned. He 
would bring into the picture the stars of heaven 
for a diadem of glory about His head; he would 
bring in all the angelic host and set them in 


136 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


shining legions around Him. And so he would 
have us marvel that amid all the things which 
the friends of Jesus had vehemently urged Him 
to do, or not to do, and all the other things 
beyond their dull conceiving which He Himself 
had power to do, He was content to do that one 
thing—to stand there and witness the good 
confession. 

And here, in truth, was the mystery of the 
Kingdom as Jesus had always taught it and as 
Paul himself had come to know it. ‘The mystery 
of the Kingdom was that it worked in ways 
which seemed so ineffectual, setting out to do so 
much by means and methods which seemed so 
disproportionately small. The mystery of the 
Kingdom was that the Son of God came not as 
a warrior going forth to war but as a sower going 
forth to sow; that the Kingdom of Heaven, as 
Jesus taught it, was not like unto marching armies 
and an assault with battering-rams and catapults 
and bowmen and spears, but like unto seed which 
a man should cast into the earth and which should 
be covered over and die. . . . It was as if Jesus 
had committed His cause to the sheer impotency 
of things. ‘* Knowest Thou not,” says marvelling 
Pilate jiithatel haverpower.2 tn! 

But then the mystery of the Kingdom was this, 
also—that the seed, dying and rising again, was 


Christ Incarnate 137 


mightier than the sharp arrows of the mighty— 
that the seemingly ineffectual dust to which it 
was committed was withal more potent than 
the armies which might trample it to-day beneath 
their iron feet—to-morrow to return to dust 
together. Along with seed and soil, in invincible 
alliance, fight all the stars in their courses and 
all the viewless legions of the winds, the sun 
also, and all the clouds of heaven, and “ God 
that quickeneth all things”: and thus the sower 
at last triumphs over all the warriors of the 
earth. 

In some such strain as this, Paul, perhaps, 
would have Timothy consider that picture of 
Christ Jesus witnessing the good confession before 
Pilate. Lest, that is to say, Timothy should 
presently ask in the relapsing tone, ‘‘ What can 
one man do?” Lest he should say, as so often 
good men have been tempted to say—and com- 
munities and nations, also: ‘“‘ We are outbid, 
outnumbered; we have no power: what can 
wedo?” Son Timothy, thou canst do what the 
Son of God Himself elected to do; thou canst 
witness the good confession! What if that be 
the mightiest thing of all? 

What, we may add, if that be the mightiest 
thing which any nation can do, and so doing 
suffer the last ignominy and apparent final van- 


138 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


quishment? For a nation so resolved and so 
committed there remains, it may be, one thing 
which it cannot do; it cannot perish. 


II. CRUCIFIED. 


Had we been dependent upon Paul, in his 
epistles and reported discourses, for the story 
of the Passion, we should still have gathered that 
the closing scenes of Jesus’ ministry lay in Jeru- 
salem; that He was actively opposed by the 
Jewish authorities; that one night He was 
betrayed into their hands; and that though they 
could prove Him guilty of nothing deserving of 
death, yet they were able to persuade a Roman 
official named Pilate to have Him condemned. 
We should have gathered that thus, having 
witnessed before Pilate the good confession, 
Jesus was hanged to a wooden cross according to 
the Roman method of crucifixion; that His 
blood was shed, and that He died; and that 
afterwards His body, presumably at the instance 
of His enemies, was taken down from the Cross 
and laid in a tomb. All these details we should 
have been able to gather from Paul’s own Life 
of Christ. Yet, compared with the Evangelists’ 
account of the circumstances of Jesus’ death, 
Paul’s record is even poignantly bare. But then 
it is not because he makes little of the Cross, 


Christ Incarnate 139 


but because he makes so much of it, that his 
references to its external circumstances are com- 
paratively meagre. Because it is central to his 
moral and spiritual life, central to the whole 
scheme and process of things in the living universe, 
he will leave descriptive detail to others, content, 
himself, to indicate the actual event in its naked 
realism—‘* He was crucified ”—-and thus to pass 
at once to its spiritual meaning. In this treat- 
ment we must now endeavour to follow him. 


It is clear that to Paul as a Jew and a Pharisee 
the Cross of Jesus had been a scandal and an 
offence. We may well believe that it was pre- 
cisely this that he set to the fore in all his fierce 
and contemptuous disputings with the followers 
of the Way wkom he hailed to prison. He was 
determined to know nothing among them but 
Christ and Him crucified; determined to placard 
that fact before them and so put them to open 
shame. For how could they believe in a Messiah 
so persecuted and so weak?—or in a “ Risen 
One” who yet did not protect His persecuted 
friends nor avenge Him of His adversaries? (And 
indeed the thought of Jesus not having avenged 
Himself seems to have remained in the mind of 
Paul the Christian, at least up to the time of 
the Thessalonian epistles.) Whatever searchings 


140 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


of heart, then, Paul, as Saul of Jerusalem, may 
have had concerning Jesus and His teachings, 
the very fact that He had not discomfited His 
persecutors, but had been “crucified through 
weakness’ (2 Cor. xiii. 4), testified in Saul’s mind 
against any Messianic claim on His behalf. 

Yet when it pleased God to reveal His Son 
in Paul, the very first revelation showed Him 
as the Persecuted One. This was the great 
mystery which Paul, ‘‘ with Augustine and Luther 
in his spiritual loins,’? had to take with him to 
Arabia. From the first there was to be no escape 
for Paul from the wounds of Jesus. 


And first of all, now that he was able to think 
calmly and clearly, there was the fact itself. 
The fact of the Cross, and of Paul’s experience 
of new life through Him who had suffered it, 
preceded all that he ever came to formulate by 
way of interpreting it. 

Moreover, Paul knew well—none could have 
known better—how Jesus came to be crucified. 
‘They that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers,” 
says he, were accountable for that deed. The | 
Synagogue, the Temple, the Sanhedrin, the 
Palace—all were marked with the blood of 
Christ’s cross. "The Pharisees were accountable, 


and the Sadducees, and the Herodians ; Caiaphas 


Christ Incarnate 141 


and Annas, Herod, too, and Pilate; yes, Gamaliel 
himself and all his school, and likewise all the 
school of Shammai; all the rabbins and all the 
rabble and all the indifferent populace—all were 
accountable for His death ; for either by vehement 
enmity or through self-seeking diplomacy, either 
by lust of power and greed of gain or by moral 
apathy, they had together made it possible and 
brought it to pass. 


There was something more. Paul came to 
see that it had all been recorded aforetime. It 
was all “according to the Scriptures.” It had 
all been foreseen and foretold. For Paul, with 
his new eyes, had gone back to the Scriptures to 
find what he had never found before—namely, 
that the Prophets had had it upon their hearts 
that the high service of God was service unto 
suffering, and that the Servant of God’s annoint- 
ing must first be despised and rejected and pierced 
with many sorrows. It came to be a matter of 
continual amazement to Paul that he and his 
countrymen should have heard those Prophets 
read Sabbath after Sabbath in the synagogue, 
and yet should have remained blind to that 
prophetic testimony, and never so blind as when 
they were fulfilling it (Acts xiii. 27-29); but 


so it was, and so it continued to be. 


142 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


But not for Paul. ‘“‘ Christ died,” he must now 
everywhere insist, ‘‘ according to the Scriptures ” 
—that is to say, according to the determinate 
counsel and foreknowledge of God. 

All the while that the whisperers and plotters 
were hurrying from house to house; all the 
while that secret councils were being called and 
treacheries connived at; all the while that false 
witnesses were being bribed and coached in their 
dark retreats; even to the lighting of the lanterns 
for the Gethsemane arrest and the lashing of the 
timbers, beam across beam, to provide for the 
Son of God His cruel death-bed—all the while 
in every act, and in every syllable of hate hissed 
through the teeth of Annas and Caiaphas and 
their perjured men, the Divine purpose moved 
to its predicted fulfilment. 

To what end? To the end that a divine 
Crisis should be brought to pass. 


In the first place it was a Crisis unto Con- 
demnation. God through the Cross condemned 
Sin in such a way that the condemnation was to 
reverberate through the conscience of the world. 
Christ, says Paul, condemned sin in the flesh. 
Did not Mark Antony put a tongue in every 
wound of murdered Cesar to move the very 
stones of Rome? But, for Paul, murdered 


Christ Incarnate 143 


Czsar’s wounds were as nothing to the wounds 
of Jesus. The wounds of Jesus had in them 
condemnation so complete, so final, that they 
meant for Paul the end of the whole order of 
things, the end of the world. 

, For the sins which sent Jesus to the Cross 
/ were not unique or extraordinary ; they were the 
common sins of mankind. 

The complacent, well-fed Sadducees, secure 
in their comfortable livings, who had ambled 
to the Sanhedrin to discuss the strange case of 
the Nazarene; the lean and soured Pharisees, 
bigoted for a tradition once vital, but now 
embalmed and enswathed in cerements of custom 
and formality ; the sleek and perfumed Herodians, 
also, with their sycophantic affectations and 
cynical insincerities; Herod himself, with his 
vile little world of women and wine, intrigue and 
ambition, superstition and vanity; Annas, the 
priest in politics, the politician in Orders, with 
his well-farmed revenues and his well-laid schemes 
of patronage and power; Caiaphas, born and 
reared in the Annas world, married into the 
Annas family, pledged to the Annas policies and 
protected by the Annas interests; Pilate, grown 
morally stale in office, with his official ambitions 
and his official embarrassments, and his oppor- 
tunist surrender of a troublesome case, which, 


144 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


after all, was but one among many; Judas 
Iscariot, with his soul consumed of egotism and 
his mind darkened with an egotist’s resentments 
and given over to base designs; the suborned 
witnesses, their tongues a-drip with lis, their 
wits too sodden to lie consistently ; the soldiery, 
with their coarse, barrack-room jests and their 
callous horseplay; the rabble, with their brute 
lust for noise and blood; the indifferent populace, 
that went its way unheeding, or stood awhile and 
gazed, and went its way again, preoccupied with 
its own affairs—what were all these but men 
whose passions and apathies had been common 
throughout all generations? ‘Their sins were not 
peculiar, but representative; and, among other 
things, in this—that those same sins were so 
built into their lives, so built into the very fabric 
of their world, that for them to break away from 
their sins and form a clear judgment upon a 
moral issue which challenged them was for them 
to leap out of themselves and out of their world, 
and seek a standpoint in the air. They were 
“* concluded in sin concluded. ‘This was what 
Calvary had brought to light. Not the Law 
itself had so condemned sin and exposed it as 
Christ had condemned and exposed it, on the 
Cross. In that sense the Cross was the end of 
the world. For sin was so inextricably inter- 


Christ Incarnate 145 


woven with the whole order of the world’s life 
that for it to be thus condemned was for that 
order itself to be marked for destruction. 

But then the Crisis was likewise unto Life. 
The Cross was the creative centre of a new, 
transcendent experience, a new order, a new 
world. | 

Paul had known himself condemned the moment 
he found himself before the Lord of Glory. There 
was no appeal from the sentence of the wounds 
of Christ: ‘‘ I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.”’ 
But with the condemnation came the call to a 
new life. In the house of Judas of Damascus, 
when the scales fell from his eyes and he felt in 
his very frame the electric thrill of a new vitality, 
he came to know that condemnation to the utter- 
most had wrought itself into uttermost recon- 
ciliation; and later he was to learn that that 
reconciliation, wrought within his own heart, 
was to embrace all things and fashion a new and 
universal order (Col. 1. 19, 20). 

It was precisely in this paradox of mercy in 
judgment, reconciliation in condemnation, life 
in death, that Paul found and proved his peace: 
for in this paradox lay the mystery of Divine 
atonement. 


It is true that Paul knew himself reconciled 
K 


146 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


to God apart from any theory of reconciliation ; 
but whatever it first meant to him in the house 
of Judas, it could not have remained simply as 
a gush of feeling, a vague persuasion of the 
Divine Love. For the category of holiness was 
never absent from Paul’s thought, and it is safe 
to say that for him no reconciliation could have 
been conceivably valid between himself and the 
holy God which did not first pass consuming 
judgment upon Paul’s sins. Reconciliation had 
to be rooted not only in Love but in Law; it 
had to address itself not only to the heart but 
to the conscience. 

Thus, for Paul, it had to include the idea of 
Expiation. However it may be with us, it was 
not in Paul to believe that the forgiveness of sin 
was something which passed as an easy ripple 
over the placid surface of the Divine benignity. 
It was God who forgave, and not simply a de- 
tached attribute of God. As for Paul himself, 
night and day his sins were ever before him. 
They were zhere, and nothing could put them 
finally out of the way which did not reckon with 
the Divine Law and the Divine Holiness. So 
that it is safe, also, to say that not even the 
Righteousness of Jesus Christ Himself could have 
met the sore need of Paul’s sin-burdened con- 
sclence, nor penetrated to the innermost core of 


Christ Incarnate 14.7 


his trouble, had he not felt that that Righteous- 
ness had expiation at the heart of it. But that 
expiation, wrought out of the nature of God, was 
set forth in the Passion of Christ’s Cross. 

For Paul, then, to believe in Christ crucified 
was at once to acknowledge the sentence of death 
and to receive the assurance of eternal life. To 
believe in Him was to realize the end of all things 
and the beginning of all things new. Religions, 
moralities, races, classes were all dissolved around 
the new and crucial centre. To pass under the 
portal of the Cross was to abandon all hope, and 
to find it for ever. And if our evangelical fathers, 
following Paul, were disposed to interpret all 
this in formulas too legal and transactional, 
laying stress upon theories which no longer 
satisfy the mind, at least is it not true that their 
doctrine of Substitution was nearer to Paul, 
and, what is more, nearer to human need and 
the testimony of Christian experience, than its 
negation could ever be? If to-day we incline 
to say that the Atonement, like the Incarnation, 
is not simply an event but a process, and that 
the Divine Passion may be traced through the 
ages in the vicarious sorrows of all who through 
the Eternal Spirit have offered themselves for 
the succour of men—even s0, shall it be less true 
that that Passion found its supreme expression 


148 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


in the Cross of Christ—that there the guilty 
conscience finds as nowhere else the absolving 
word? Paul, indeed, must always pass beyond 
us. We come to feel that for him the Atone- 
ment passes finally beyond all events and processes 
of time, and stands as the Eternal Act of God. 


So that to all this we must add that not even 
Christ Crucified. was the ultimate objective of 
Paul’s thought concerning the Divine Passion. 
Paul’s thought does not terminate upon the 
cross of Jesus. ‘‘God sent forth His Son”; 
and in all that Paul has to say God is never 
the impassive Sublime whose being extends like 
the untroubled sky which canopies all the unquiet 
worlds, nor yet the vigilant inexorable One whose 
concern is for transcendent abstractions; He is 
the Holy Victim of His own love for His prodigal 
worlds. It is the way of all God’s sons to be 
unsparing of themselves; but the measure of 
the Passion was that God spared not His Son 
and therefore spared not His own heart. ‘There 
was a Cross behind the cross, and on that un- 
apparent Cross suffered the Father Himself. 

But yet more. Not even upon that Divine 
and unapparent Cross can Paul’s thought ter- 
minate: for with Paul there is nothing of that 
morbid ‘‘ Worship of Sorrow ” which has tinc- 


Christ Incarnate 149 


tured the devotional thought both of Evangelical- 
ism and Catholicism. Beyond the Cross is the 
triumph of Love and of Life—‘the far more 
exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” 


There is something else that may not be left 
unsaid. We may speak if we will of the Cross 
as the centre of Divine philosophy; but for Paul 
there was a poignant something in the theme 
which pierced through all eloquence and smote it 
to the dust. ‘“‘ He loved me and gave Himself 
for me.” 

We come at length to see that if Calvary has 
Divine significance at all, it can mean no less for 
each one of us. If God was indeed in Christ, 
and the Cross was the supreme witness to His 
eternal Passion, it can mean no less. For the 
love and sacrifice of the Divine Fatherhood 
cannot fall short of the love and sacrifice of 
human fatherhood, which is particular and dis- 
cerning toward each member of the family. 


12. Buriep. 


“And when they had fulfilled all that was 
written of Him” (says Paul according to the 
chronicler of the Acts), “they took Him down 
from the tree, and laid Him in a sepulchre.”’ 
“For I delivered unto you,” he writes to the 


150 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Corinthians, ‘*. .. how that Christ died for 
our sins according to the Scriptures, and that 
He was buried.” 

Surely there is a strange vividness and terrible 
divine irony in the former of these statements. 
They took Him down. The suggestion is that 
it was His enemies who undertook to have Him 
removed from the cross. It agrees with the 
record of John xix. 31: ‘‘ The Jews, therefore, 
because it was the Preparation, that the bodies 
should not remain upon the cross on the Sabbath 
day (for that sabbath was an high day), besought 
Pilate that ... they might be taken away.” 
They so besought him out of pious regard for 
the Law of Moses which ran: “ If a man have 
committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to 
be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: 
his body shall not remain all night upon the 
tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that 
day (for he that is hanged is accursed of God), 
that thy land be not defiled . ..”?. (Dentiiigas 
22, 23). Here was their motive and intention ; 
and Paul is content to indicate it. 

They took Him down from the tree. It was 
a matter of religious scruple; and they were 
religious men. His dead body was more than 
unsightly ; it was a ceremonial defilement. As 
religious men with a nice conscience in the 


Christ Incarnate 151 


matter of the decencies of the law and of Sabbath 
observance, they would not have it hanging there 
overnight ; particularly as the next Sabbath was 
a high day. His body up there on the cross 
would mar the decorum of the sacred festival. 
As religious men, they must have it taken down 
and put out of sight. But not, says Paul, before 
they, being religious men, had fulfilled all that 
was written of Him; they had, it would seem, 
been careful to see to that! ‘The Prophets that 
were read every Sabbath day—they had fulfilled 
them in rejecting Him; they had fulfilled them 
in condemning Him; they had fulfilled them in 
slaying Him. And now, having fulfilled the 
Prophets, they must fulfil the Law. So they 
took Him down, and saw to it: that He was 
buried. 

Terrible, divine irony! These busy little 
men, whose so cunning schemes have been so 
cleverly carried out; these self-gratulating little 
men, who have worked so well to their pro- 
gramme, and accomplished, not without difficulty 
and anxiety, their every design; these truly 
indispensable little men, without whom the 
True Faith, once for all delivered to the Fathers, 
must perish from the earth—in ways quite other 
than they suppose they have indeed vindicated 
the Scriptures, of whose inspiration they are the 


rte St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


expert champions, and fulfilled the Law and the 
Prophets! Not as painted puppets strung on 
the leading-strings of Fate have they done all 
this—for then had they no condemnation nor 
any shame—but as fools and blind whose folly 
and whose blindness are the slow result of multi- 
tudinous secret apostasies of heart—as_ such, 
though all unknowing, they have offered them- 
selves to the Maker of all history, the Fashioner 
of every event: and they have been used! 


The burial of Jesus, then, set the seal of com- 
pleteness upon His sacrifice. There was the 
solemn finality of the tomb. And it was alto- 
gether to the mind of Paul to seek in Christian 
experience the moral and mystical equivalent of 
this last act, also, in the Saviour’s Passion. As 
we are crucified with Christ, so, says Paul, must we 
be buried with Him: and it was his way to 
interpret Christian Baptism as symbolically a 
burial-rite: ‘‘ Our baptism into His death made 
us share His burial’? (Rom. vi. 4: Moffatt). 
“*'You were buried with Him in your baptism ” 
(Col. ii. 12: Moffatt). The believer must have 
a grave in his history. Self must be mortified 
even to the finality of burial, that so, from the 
tomb of that dead self, he may rise into newness 


of life. 


VI 
CHRIST RISEN AND EXALTED 


1. Intropuctory.—‘ At midday, O king.” 


Foremost in the great Life of Christ written 
upon Paul’s mind and heart, and in the great 
Resurrection chapter which was the first of that 
Life to be so written, stands the record of Paul’s 
own experience of the Lord of Glory. For to 
Paul, while yet he was Saul the Pharisee, all that 
Cephas and James had testified to, and the rest 
who were apostles before him, was but an idle 
tale and worse, until Jesus Christ shone down 
upon him on the road to Damascus. And as we 
of to-day seek our own clue to faith and reality, 
we do well to betake ourselves to that which lies 
behind Paul’s thought upon this theme—to his 
own vital and transforming experience. 

It is indeed arguable that by omitting all refer- 
ence to the appearance of Christ to the women 
at the sepulchre, all direct reference to the sepul- 
chre itself, all explicit allusion to a bodily mani- 
festation at all, and by grouping with his own 
vision all the other appearances which he cites, 

153 


154 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Paul shows that he has no thought of anything 
other than a spiritual Christophany. But is not 
this to press the argument from silence too far, 
and to do violence alike to the plain inference of 
Paul’s language and to all that we know already 
of his mind? None the less is it true, however, 
that while Paul’s thought concerning the Resur- 
rection came to be grounded upon the demon- 
stration of the first Christian Easter, his own 
faith was fashioned, not at the sepulchre, but on 
the Damascus road. When he says, “‘ Have I 
not seen Jesus our Lord?” he has in mind the 
glory that shone about him on that never-to-be- 
forgotten journey, and, it may be, every visional 
experience of Christ granted to him thereafter ; 
and he has them in mind as confirmed to him by 
the continuous inflow of a new life of moral and 
spiritual power—the power of the Holy Spirit. 


“At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light 
from heaven” (Acts xxvi. 13). He saw a Light 
and he heard a Voice; and in that hour he knew 
that a Power not his own had come upon him, 
and a command not to be disobeyed had been 
laid upon his soul. 

But that Light, uncomprehended, and that 
Voice, unrecognized, had always been with him. 
Was not that in part the secret of the inward, 


Christ Risen and Exalted 155 


compelling authority of the heavenly vision? 
Must we not believe that somehow, in the deeps 
of Saul’s being that day, he knew that that 
mysterious One, shining down upon him, had 
had all along His own unheeded witness in Paul’s 
own heart? Must we not believe that what then 
shone upon him in blinding effulgence was not 
altogether distinct from the Light which had 
shone within him, an uncomprehended flame: 
and that that pale flame was now leaping up 
toward the down-shining glory? Is not this the 
way every new revelation authenticates itself to 
the soul of man—announcing itself to us as if it 
had known us before and known us deeply— 
giving us, also, a new clue to ourselves, awaking 
occult memories? 

Moreover, of late and with increasing fre- 
quency, Saul had seen something of the mystic 
play of that Light on the faces of others—on 
the faces of the followers of the Way. ‘There 
was unquestionably a strange shining about them. 
How bright it had shone in the face of Stephen ! 
And all the while that it was so shining, it was 
signalling, as it were, to that dim flame within 
Saul himself, and so troubling him that he was 
fain to keep the secret even from himself—so 
troubling him that a madness grew upon him to 
stamp it out wherever it showed itself. But it 


156 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


had been very hard to track down and stamp out 
that strange shining; and all the while that he 
was pursuing it, it was pursuing him. Until “at 
midday, O king, I saw. . .,” with a sight so 
sudden and so clear that it swooned into blind- 
ness. For that Light against which he had striven 
so long had at last outshone the sun at noon- 
tide, turning Saul’s day into darkness, that it 
might turn his darkness into everlasting day. 


And that Light was Jesus Christ. For the 
Glory had become vocal, speaking to Saul in his 
own Hebrew tongue and saying, “‘ Iam Jesus... .” 
And it was enough. Not more surely now did 
Saul know that he had been persecuting Jesus 
than that by the same token he had been con- 
tending against the Light. Jesus and the Light 
were one. 

After that, and after those days of darkness 
and trembling and prayer in Judas’ house, and 
after Ananias’ ‘‘ Brother Saul, the Lord, even 
Jesus... hath sent me,” and after the living 
touch of Ananias’ hands, and after the healing 
and the light and the brokenness and the joy, 
and the new, vivid sense of vocation and destiny 
(as if life had at last, and suddenly, leaped into 
its true meaning)—after all this, Saul needed no 
further evidence. He had no impulse to examine 


Christ Risen and Exalted P57 


the tomb or interrogate witnesses. That the 
Lord had appeared to Cephas and the rest was 
no longer to be questioned. He had evidence 
enough. For it had pleased God, who had set 
him apart even from his birth, to reveal His Son 
in him ;. and he needed now no other testimony. 
The Light had found him; and that Light was 
Jesus Christ, living and exalted. As he puts it, 
the kindness of God our Saviour and His love 
toward man had appeared—had dawned upon 
him—not by works done in righteousness which 
he himself had done, but by a regenerating ex- 
perience, by the renewing of the Holy Ghost 
which God had richly poured out through Jesus 
Christ our Saviour (Titus il. 4-7). 


Henceforth Paul’s thought concerning the 
Resurrection was to pass through a mysticising 
process. But to say this as if it meant that for 
Paul the Resurrection was sublimated into an 
idea—that he was presently content to regard it 
only as a subjective mystery, the symbol of a 
spiritual principle and process—is surely a strange 
perversion. Paul’s thought is mystical because 
it is first of all historical; it is subjective because 
it is first of all intensely objective. For him the 
facts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection were so 
truly and tremendously facts outside of, and 


158 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


independent of, all that was Paul—so objective 
and substantial and Divinely original—that every- 
thing else had to abdicate to them. Paul himself 
had to abdicate. What he was and thought and 
felt no longer mattered; what mattered was 
Christ Crucified and Exalted and that faith 
which laid hold upon Him. It was this very 
objectivity of faith which made, so to say, its 
own subjectivity—this flight out of experience 
which became in itself a new experience. “I 
am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, 
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. For the life 
that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith 
of the Son of God who loved me and gave 
Himself for me.” 


For Paul, indeed, the Resurrection of Christ 
was a fact emergent in three realms—the physical, 
the historical and the spiritual. On the physical 
side it was a fact like unto the recurring miracle 
of spring-time and harvest. Christ’s physical 
resurrection was the first fruits of that harvest 
one day to be reaped from the fields of death; 
and as to that harvest, God raises the dead as 
He does the wheat, which is sown in weakness 
and raised in power, sown in one body and raised 
in a more glorious body, according to the opera- 
tion of the Divine Law. ‘To open this Pauline 


Christ Risen and Exalted 159 


saying so as to make it mean no more than the 
dissolution of the mortal body and the ascent of 
the spirit is hardly to open it at all, but to ex- 
change one saying for another. At one stage in 
Paul’s thought there is at least a direct connection, 
though not identity, between the mortal and the 
resurrection bodies of believers; and this has its 
bearing upon Paul’s thought concerning the 
resurrection of Christ. 

One is tempted to add in  parenthesis—Is 
Paul’s thought here, in its general principle, so 
alien to us that it makes no appeal? We may 
sometimes wish that in all this Paul had been 
less a Hebrew and more a Greek; yet is there 
no unborn thought in us which leaps at times 
within the mental womb at the sound of the 
challenging apostolic word? Have we no kin- 
ship with this planetary dust and visible stuff of 
the world, that we should say, “A few more 
years and we are done with it for ever!”? Is 
there not that within us which would say, the 
rather: ‘‘ Dust of the earth, there is redemption 
for thee also! Thou and I shall meet again! 
Thou, too, art spiritual, and spirit shall reclaim 
thee unto the triumph of life!”? 

It seems, at any rate, that Paul is persuaded 
that the outward body of Jesus which was formed 
of the dust and perished on the Cross and was 


160 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


buried—that that visible tenement of the spirit 
was reclaimed and changed and glorified through 
the working of Him who is able to subdue all 
things unto Himself; and he is persuaded of © 
this, not as of a thing for ever unique, but as the 
pledge and evidence of a universal law. 

Then for Paul, as we have seen, Christ’s Resur- 
rection was a fact in the realm of history—a fact 
of time and place, attested by many witnesses. 
And again, in the realm of the soul it was a fact 
both objective and subjective. Objectively it 
demonstrated that God had met the deepest 
needs of man’s spiritual nature—the need of 
pardon and acquittal—the need of a sure basis 
of fellowship with Himself—the need of an 
assured hope of immortality ; and subjectively it 
contained the principle and power of that inward 
death unto newness of life, through which the 
believer mystically re-lives the life of his Lord. 


““ At midday, O king.” Has that noon faded 
from our sky? Are there some things, clearer 
for Paul than the sun, which for us have somehow 
become involved in thick shadows? 

It may be that in some respects it is with the 
Pauline faith to-day much as it was at Athens 
when the apostle unfolded his.divine philosophy 


to his curious-minded hearers. His discourse 


Christ Risen and Exalted 161 


upon the Divine transcendence and immanence, 
upon the spiritual origin of the universe, upon 
the oneness of the human race and the Divine 
Providence in history, and upon the spiritual 
function of nationhood (Acts xvii. 22-29) appears 
to have been favourably received. But it is 
recorded that when he proceeded to speak of the 
Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, some 
mocked, while others with a more Athenian 
courtesy suggested the postponement of the dis- 
cussion—to some undated occasion. No doubt, 
had Paul spoken of Immortality, he would have 
continued to hold his hearers, but the Resurrec- 
tion lost him his audience: and in this the 
Athenian mind and the modern mind are not 
greatly dissimilar. ‘The world is still young, and 
the mind of man considerably younger. Our 
present exploration and interpretation of reality 
are still tentative and somewhat incomplete. It 
is even possible that our constantly changing 
modes of thought may presently enter a cycle in 
which the latest and fullest understanding of 
things will be found to intersphere Paul’s own 
position. In the meantime, driven by the stress 
of truth’s warfare to seek the innermost defences 
of certitude, we do well to distinguish between 
Paul’s interpretations and his vital experience. 

“* At midday.” It is true that Paul’s noon is 

L 


162 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


not ours. Paul’s day is not our day, though the 
Light which made his day is ours also. ‘The 
Light is the same; but the latitude is different. 
The nomad generations of thought and faith 
have travelled far since the first Christian century, 
and the panorama of truth is approached and 
surveyed from a different quarter. It is plain, 
for instance, that the passing of the centuries 
has brought to us a wider outlook upon the 
spiritual Lordship and Kingdom of Christ than 
Paul could possibly have possessed through the 
Damascus illumination; on the other hand, what 
may be termed the physical facts of the first 
Easter are farther from us, involved in the haze 
of distance. ‘To say this is to acknowledge the 
will of God writ large in the very necessities of 
time and sense. Is there no room for a kenotic 
theory as applied to truth itself? Are there not 
truths which pass through a kenosis of their own, 
emptying themselves, so to say, of their regal 
certitude, that, thus abased and impoverished, 
they may presently enrich us with some new 
and wealthier assurance of the spirit ? 


Continually, then, it is to the living experience 
behind the Pauline interpretations that we have 
to look, confident that the light which has made 
that experience luminous for each succeeding age 


Christ Risen and Exalted 163 


was, and is, no mere play of inner phosphorescence, 
but the outshining of something eternally real 
and glorious. Is it not here that our great 
doctors of grace have always found their certi- 
tude? ‘‘A man does not doubt things that are 
an integral part of his daily existence.” ‘‘ We 
have been in personal contact with God.... 
We solemnly declare that we have felt the power 
of the Holy Spirit over our soul as much as ever 
old ocean has felt the force of the north wind... . 
We find that in the little world within our soul 
the Lord Jesus manifests Himself so that we 
know Him.” Between the testimony of a modern 
apostle * and the original Pauline experience there 
is the vital continuum which, stretching through 
the centuries, constitutes the supreme apologetic 


of the Easter Faith. 


2. ** RatisED ON THE Tuirp Day.” 


It was plain to Paul that the Cross was a 
stumbling-block which cost him a large con- 
stituency that otherwise might have been friendly ; 
the Cross was a stumbling-block, and the Stone 
rolled away from the sepulchre a rock of offence, 
and to set forth these two things was, in the minds 
of many, to babble of sheer folly. This was 
_ probably plainer to Paul than to any that were 
* C. H. Spurgeon. 


164 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


apostles before him—plainer, perhaps, than to 
any leader of the Church save Apollos of Alex- 
andria. As for Apollos, was it not after his 
eloquent and popular ministry that Paul found 
it necessary to set forth all over again to the 
Corinthian Church not only the doctrine of the 
general Resurrection, but also the very proofs of 
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third 
day? 


Beyond doubt Paul could see that this doctrine 
was getting for him many a rebuff, and that 
there were those within the Church who held it 
all too loosely; nor was it his way to antagonize 
men’s minds, but rather to seek the point of con- 
tact, becoming a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to 
the Greeks; but upon this question he was in 
no mood to compromise. That Christ, crucified 
and buried, was risen from the dead had been to 
him, too, a doctrine of sheer and detestable folly ; 
but it was precisely this point of controversy and 
derision which had become for him the point of 
contact with the Power of God; and therefore, 
against all calculations of prudence, he must pro- 
claim it in the simplicity in which he himself 
had received it. 

Let Apollos, then, with all his training in Philo 
(who would have no Resurrection), and with all 


Christ Risen and Exalted 165 


his later training in the water-baptism and 
discipline of John, and with his still later and 
supplementary instruction in Christian doctrine 
under Priscilla and Aquila—let Apollos preach 
and teach according to the measure of faith given 
to him; Paul must preach Christ crucified and 
risen from the dead the third day. 


The new leader, whatever his doctrinal or 
ritual emphasis, is still ‘‘my brother Apollos ” ; 
Paul has planted and Apollos (with perhaps a 
Johannine rather than a Pauline emphasis upon 
baptism !) has watered, and it is well; ‘“‘ he that 
planteth and he that watereth are one” (1 Cor. 
i. 8); and they, also, who have learned to say, 
‘There is no resurrection,’ whatever Paul may 
think of the logic of their position, are still to be 
entreated as saints in the Lord: but for all that— 
“* According to the grace of God which was given 
unto me, as a wise master builder, I laid a founda- 
tion; and another buildeth thereon. But let 
each man take heed how he buildeth thereon ”’ 
(1 Cor. ui. 10). For “* brothers, I would have you 
know the gospel I once preached to you, the gospel 
you received, the gospel in which you have your 
footing, the gospel by which you are saved—pro- 
vided you adhere to my statement of 1t—unless 


indeed your faith was all haphazard. First and 


166 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


foremost I passed on to you what I had myself 
received, namely, that Christ died for our sins 
as the Scriptures had said, that He was buried, 
that He rose on the third day as the Scriptures 
had said; and that He was seen. . .” (1 Cor. 
xv. 1-5: Moffatt). 

This is Paul’s gospel. In itself nothing could 
be clearer, more objective, less mystical, more 
insistent in its emphasis upon external and 
attested fact. For in all this Paul must be true 
to himself and his own experience. 


3. “‘ HE was SEEN.” 


It may have been a derisive criticism on the 
lips of Saul the Pharisee that Jesus had shown 
Himself alive after His Passion only to His friends. 
But when the day came for that last protective 
criticism and defiance to wither like Jonah’s 
gourd before the fierce light that beat upon the 
Damascus road, Saul came to understand that 
there was in this a sovereignty and selectiveness 
which belong to all the ways of God with man. 
For God hath His pressed men, and He will 
choose whom He will; as it is written: ‘‘ Him 
God raised up the third day, and gave Him to 
be made manifest, not to all the people, but unto 
witnesses that were chosen before of God” 


(Acts x. 40, 41). 


Christ Risen and Exalted 167 


Is not Vision always for the few, albeit for the 
sake of the many? ‘To how many at any time 
does Truth appear, or Beauty, in any new revela- 
tion? ‘The seers have always been numerable as 
units in a multitudinous world. 

Shall we be wise to infer too readily that this 
must be so because of the rarity of excellence and 
the vulgarity of the mass? When Vision works 
mediately upon the many through the witness 
and dedication of the few, that ministry brings 
with it an added spiritual glory of its own. But 
more than that: Is there not a certain reticence 
of revelation, a certain sparingness of apocalypse, 
because there are delicate responses of the spirit 
which demand other conditions than the noontide 
splendour of some compelling, unveiled glory? 
Does not Truth love to be wooed in the twilight, 
also? Is it not the wisdom of God that faith 
should rest in the main upon the obedience 
and conscience of love? ‘‘ Lord, what is come 
to pass that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us 
and not unto the world? ”—“‘ If a man love Me, 
he will keep My word.” So the faith of the 
many must rest upon the free election, the 
moral choice, of that love which, seeing not 
the face of the Beloved, weaves its patient 
fidelities around the keepsake pledges of His 


word. 


168 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Yet Vision there must be, and a certain holy 
conscription in the cause of Truth. “And... 
He appeared unto Cephas; then to the Twelve ; 
then He appeared unto above five hundred 
brethren at once, of whom the greater part 
remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; 
then He appeared to James; then to all the 
apostles; and last of all He appeared to me also— 
to this so-called * abortion ’ of an apostle ” (1 Cor. 
xv. §-8: see Moffatt). So runs Paul’s litany of 
witness. He was raised—He was seen. He was 
seen again and again. In what manner ?—what 
form? Paul will not enlarge upon that. As to 
that, let each witness speak for himself. For 
himself Paul will speak most clearly and fully. 
But in every case “‘ He was seen.”” He was-~so 
seen that they who saw became His witnesses for 
ever. As for Paul, he was a witness even under 
Divine subpena, for ‘‘ Woe is me if I proclaim 
not the gospel!” 


Paul was the last witness—‘ last of all.” He 
had apparently no thought that, for the future, 
and until the Glorious Appearing, any such 
proof would be given. Henceforth belief must 
rest upon other evidence: upon the word of 
testimony, upon the Scriptures of faith, upon 
conscience, upon the viewless epiphanies of the 


Christ Risen and Exalted 169 


Spirit, upon the self-witness of the truth and the 
Power of God which accompanies it, upon the 
outshining of the Christ-illumined heart. For 
‘we all mirror the glory of the Lord with face 
unveiled, and so we are being transformed into 
the same likeness, passing from one glory to 
another—for this comes of the Lord the Spirit. 
Hence, as I hold this ministry by God’s mercy, I 


never lose heart in it. ... I state the truth 
openly, and so commend myself to every man’s 
conscience before God. ... For God... has 


shone within my heart to illuminate men with the 
knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ ” 
(2aG@orisy. 18; etc... Moffatt). 

Thus Paul could proclaim the incredible; for 
the incredible was a glory round about him and 
within him. The world and life and time were 
summed up and concluded. Christ’s Cross and 
Resurrection had made an end of all things, and 
made all things new. Henceforth Paul lived in 
Faith’s world, the transcendent and the only 
real world ; and he was invincible. 


4. “* RECEIVED UP IN GLory.” 


‘** Above, where Christ is,’ runs the Pauline 
phrase. The supernal world bore for Paul that 
all-suficing description. Christ was there, ‘‘ re- 


celved up in glory,” “highly exalted,” ‘ the 


170 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


99 66 


Head of all principality and power,” “ interceding 
for us” before the Father, in the light un- 
approachable. Concerning the “‘ heavenly places” 
all that Paul had ever learned to believe, as a 
child in Tarsus and as a student in Jerusalem, 
had come to be simplified and illuminated in the 
light of this one effulgent conception. More- 
over, whatever may have been his original Chris- 
tian belief concerning death and the great 
awakening, it seems clear that he came at length 
to believe that Christian death was simply to 
depart to be “ with Christ.” It was at once a 
sleeping and a waking; not a state but an act— 
a discharge from the warfare of earth, a quitting 
of the pilgrim-tent for an enduring habitation in 
that ‘‘ Jerusalem which is above ”—“‘ where Christ 
igs 

Nor were those heavenly places, where Christ 
was gloriously exalted, far away. In a moment, 
in the twinkling of an eye, when the senses slept 
and the soul awoke, the journey could be made. 
‘“‘] know a man in Christ who, fourteen years 
ago, was caught up to the third heaven ” (2 Cor. 
xil. 2). It was a timeless journey; and Faith 
could outrun Vision itself on that viewless path- 
way of the soul. Even while we are pent up in 
the body of our humiliation, faith can triumph 
over mortal experience and cause us to “ sit with 


Christ Risen and Exalted 171 


Christ in the heavenly places.” Even while we 
are exiled, we are at home; for by the supply of 
Christ’s Spirit we may rise above the contradiction 
of sense and the testimony of our earth-bound 
nature, and affirm the transcendent life. 

And what of the activities of the Exalted One? 
Of His “devices with the heavens” not Paul 
himself can tell us: save this—that He is con- 
tinuing His reconciling ministry toward that con- 
summation when all enmity shall be destroyed, 
and the perfected Kingdom of Love shall be 
laid at the Father’s feet. But of His earthward 
ministry Paul is very sure. For one thing, the 
Exalted Lord was welcoming His people. Is not 
this the thought that steals like secret music into 
such phrases as “‘ for ever with the Lord ”—“ at 
home with the Lord ?—‘ with Christ, which is 
far the best”? ? Year by year Paul had seen the 
pilgrims of faith preceding him into the heavenly 
country ; and he knew that Christ was welcoming 
them there. Moreover, He was empowering His 
Church upon earth. He who had “ ascended on 
high ” had “ granted gifts to men ”’ (Eph. iv. 8). 
All apostles, prophets, evangelists were the gifts 
of the Exalted Christ. Paul could well testify 
of that! It was the Exalted One who had taken 
him and given himto men. But, above all, there 
was the truth, never far from the thought of 


172 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Paul, that the life of Christ in glory was the life 
of the Spirit, and that by His Spirit Christ was 
living in His people and in the Church, which is 
His Body. 


5. Tne Spirit or Curis. 


For Paul, every man, but especially the believ- 
ing man, was a complex, not a simple, personality. 
Together with the individual ego there was the 
“‘not-I” of indwelling sin and the “ not-I” of 
the indwelling Christ. ‘‘If Christ is within 
you. .-. the spirit 1s living?’ (Rom. avin 
Moffatt); and ‘‘if any man have not the Spirit 
of Christ, he is none of His” (Rom. vii. 9). 
Conversion was conversion to the Spirit of Christ ; 
and sanctification was through the same Spirit. 
All the Pauline doctrines of grace, the doctrine 
of Regeneration, of Justification by Faith, of 
Sanctification, the doctrine of the Church itself, 
are to be understood not otherwise than as a 
setting forth of that Life of Christ which belongs 
through the Spirit to the experience of men. 
The vital test was always the test of the Spirit. 
As many as were led by the Spirit of God, they 
were the sons of God. 

For obviously we may not regard the doctrinal 
and cultural standard of Paul’s epistles as indicat- 
ing the general level of the faith and culture of 


Christ Risen and Exalted 173 


the early Church. Many, as we know, were weak 
in the faith, and all too strong in fantastic notions © 
and superstitions of their own; many had but 
the meagrest equipment of mental culture. For 
such no great levelling imposition of doctrinal 
conformity was possible; but the supreme test 
remained: “If any man have not the Spirit of 
Grist 4.577 

And with Paul “ the Holy Spirit,” “ the Spirit 
of Christ,” were not simply equivalent terms for 
that Spirit of God which had always been abroad 
in the world; they stood for the Spirit of God 
as flowing through the exalted and liberated per- 
sonality of Jesus. The Spirit was the spiritual 
presence and power of Christ working in believing 
men a new, distinctive experience of life in God. 
For God, who in the fulness of the time had “ sent 
forth His Son,” had now “sent forth the Spirit 
of His Son, crying, Abba, Father,” in the hearts of 
men (Gal. iv. 4, 6). So we have Paul’s question 
to the Ephesians who had known only John’s 
baptism: ‘“* Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when 
vem Devicwed test Clearly.) they: ‘had beeny ledyot 
the Divine Spirit; else how could they have 
advanced to the point they had reached? Never- 
theless Paul must instruct them in the fuller faith 
and baptize them in the name of the Lord Jesus. 
** And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, 


174 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


the Holy Spirit came upon them ”—the power of 
God mediated through the spiritual presence of 
Jesus—“ and they spake with tongues and prophe- 
sied ”’ (Acts xviii. 6). 

But this experience was not merely psychical. 
It seems clear that Paul came to have certain 
misgivings concerning any unqualified emphasis 
upon this aspect of the new experience, as distinct 
from its ethical manifestations. ‘The supreme 
manifestation of the Spirit was in the moral 
realm. ‘The harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, 
peace, good temper, kindliness, generosity, fidelity, 
gentleness, self-control” (Gal. v. 22, 23: Moffatt). 
None the less, the empowerment was distinctive ; 
it was the life of Christ in the heart, bringing to 
man’s nature that paracletion without which it 
must be for ever incomplete. 

For, as Paul well understood, man’s whole life 
is an outgoing. He must seek that beyond him- 
self which has the secret of his life’s fulfilment. 
Man has always been haunted by a sense of the 
unattained, and thus by a yearning for God. 
The difficulty has been that men have fallen back 
from the Divine lure as climbers have fallen back 
before the virgin heights, which have challenged 
them only to vanquish them. And in truth there 
is a sense in which the idea of the transcendent 
God is annihilating to the mind that views it 
over against man’s puny individuality. But Paul 


Christ Risen and Exalted A 


says, “‘ Ye are complete in Him”; and when he 
does so, he is thinking, not of a faltering climb 
up the heavenly steeps, or a searching of the 
unfathomable abyss (Rom. x. 6-8), but of Christ 
through whom we have access by one Spirit unto 
the Father, and in whom we may behold God 
and live. Through His Spirit we may here and 
now realise in some measure that enlargement and 
completion of experience which we seek; for in 
Him the flow of our desire is borne toward the 
consummating Sea, and the eternal tide flows 
inward to meet us. 


It is to this experience of the life of Christ 
in the heart that Paul would bring us. ‘ Be not 
drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled 
with the Spirit.” It is Christ against Dionysus. 
For does not the allusion point to the god of the 
vine—that ‘‘ god within” which, according to 
the Orphic sacrament, dwelt in the blood of the 
grape, and gave himself for man’s surcease ? 

In the music and the laughter, 
In the vanishing of care, 
And of all before and after ; 
In the God’s high banquet, where 
Gleams the grape-blood flashed to heaven; 
Yea, and in the feasts of men 


Comes his crownéd slumber; then 
Pain is dead and hate forgiven.* 


* Euripides: The Bacche. Prof. Gilbert Murray’s Trans- 
lation. 


176 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


In this Pauline challenge, then, we may include 
the whole Pagan approach to life. For it was 
not only through excess of wine that men sought 
to open the sluice-gates of feeling. Why had sport 
and the gladiatorial arena such fascination for the 
crowd in Paul’s day? Was it not because for that 
vivid spectacular hour each man in the cloud of 
witnesses that overhung the arena felt himself to 
be more than himself? Every success of his 
favourites was his success, every failure, his 
failure ; so he cheered and laughed and wept and 
experienced a fine expansion. And so with the 
drama, with war, with love, with the droll 
ecstasies of buffoonery and laughter. 

Men are wrong, says Paul, not in seeking ex- 
pansion and high abandonment, but in the per- 
version of the quest; and all Paul’s doctrine of 
Christ, of His mediatorship, of His living Spirit, 
simplifies into the experienced truth that Jesus 
Christ by His Spirit brings to the perverted but 
divine thirst of man the authentic wine of healing 
and of life. For man’s thirst is for spiritual 
fellowship with his kind, consummated in the 
fellowship of the Living God; and through 
Christ we are led into that wide-embracing and 
supreme communion. ‘To this faith Paul would 
bring us, and with this experience he would 
leave us—strengthened with power through the 


Christ Risen and Exalted 177 


Spirit in the inward man, so that, Christ dwelling 
in our hearts by faith, and we being rooted and 
grounded in love, we may apprehend with all 
saints the abyss of the Divine Mystery, and know 
the surpassing love of Christ, and be “ filled unto 
all the fulness of God.” For it is not any doctrine 
of Christ or of His Spirit which is the end of 
Paul’s teaching, nor yet Christ Himself; it is the 
eternal God, mediating His fulness through Christ 
to men. 


6. Tue Lire or Curist 1n His Cuurcu. 


Paul knew nothing of individual perfection 
apart from a perfected society. ‘The “‘ perfecting 
of the saints’? must come through “‘ the upbuild- 
ing of the Body,” which is the spiritual society of 
all believers in vital union with the Living Lord. 
Thus and only thus shall they all reach “ the full 
measure of development which belongs to the 
fulness of Christ ” (Eph. iv. 13. Moffatt). 

There is, indeed, in Paul a vehement egoism 
and intensity of individual feeling. ‘There is that 
in him which chimes with Emerson’s “‘ He that 
finds»God a sweet, enveloping thought to him, 
never counts his company,” and with Browning’s— 


My God, my God, let me for once look on Thee 
As though naught else existed, we alone! * 


* Pauline. 


178 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


But he has little in common with that religionism 
which must always see every man as if he existed 
alone, and have him concentrate upon an isolated 
experience. 

Paul recognizes that a spiritual Society is neces- 
sary to Christ Himself. ‘The divine life which 1s 
in Him is a continuous outgoing; it must “ fill 
all things.” And as for Paul, he knew that Christ 
was being straitened in him every day. That 
life of Christ which was being lived in him was 
too great for him to contain. It must have a 
fuller embodiment than any individual personality 
could supply; it must fashion all believers into 
a Body; it must express itself in a Society, and 
that Society must develop until it should actually 
become what ideally it was already—“ the fulness 
of Him that filleth all in all.” 

So, too, as we have seen, it is necessary to the 
growth of the individual believer. Paul will 
correct that individualism of experience which, 
‘beginning explosively” and advancing into 
high frames, subsides into torpor because it 
revolves in a hypnotic circle, finding no vital 
outlet into an experience larger and more varied 
than its own. As Maeterlinck tells us of the 
strange collective wisdom of the bees, which 
becomes the medium for the Spirit of the Hive, 
and is somehow so much more than the aggregate 


Christ Risen and Exalted 179 


infinitesimal intelligence of all its busy citizens, 
so Paul will have us find in the Society of Believers 
a capacity greater than that of all its individual 
members; an area of experience, too, and a reach 
of progress, attainable by no other means than 
through association. He must strive greatly for 
the saints, that their hearts may be paracleted 
through their being “ knit together in love,” since 
only through fellowship can they come into “ all 
the riches of the full assurance of understanding,” 
and thus come to know “the mystery of God, 
even Christ ’? (Col. 11. I-3). 

And indeed, says Paul, “ this is a great mystery 
—I speak concerning Christ and His Church” 
(Eph. v. 32). With this mystery Paul was faced 
on the very day of his conversion. ‘The vital 
union of Christ and His people was proclaimed 
to him in the words of the Lord Jesus Himself : 
‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” and 
to the end it was the theme of his wondering 
meditation. He expresses it under many figures. 
The Society of Believers is a temple growing 
toward completion, Jesus Christ being the corner 
stone in which the whole structure is held together 
(Eph. ii. 20, 21). It is a house, once divided, but 
now made one through the breaking down of 
the partition-wall (Eph. u. 14) by Him who has 
purchased it for Himself. It is a Body “ fitly 


180 St. Paul's Life of Christ 
framed and knit together ” (Eph. iv. 15); a Body 


with many members all interdependent and 
sharing the one Life (1 Cor. xi. 20); a Body 
whereof the Head is Christ (Col. i. 18). It is 
the Bride of Christ, one with Him according to 
God’s ordinance (Eph. v. 31, 32). It is Bread, 
made up of many particles but united in one 
Paschal loaf, which, in a mystery, is itself Christ’s 
Body (1 Cor. x. 17). It is the household (Eph. ii. 
19) and family (Eph. i. 15) of God, whose 
Firstborn and chief Heir is Christ, in and with 
and through whom the whole brotherhood shares 
the inheritance (Rom. vil. 17; Col. i. 14, 15, etc.). 
Under all these figures Paul will set forth the truth 
that the Life of the exalted Christ is being lived 
morally and mystically in the Society of the faith- 
ful. It is when we turn our thought from éruth 
to fact, from the ideal conception to its actual 
embodiment in the little Christian communities 
of Paul’s day, that we meet the full impact of 
this apostolic faith. ‘‘ Why, look at your own 
ranks, my brothers; not many wise men (that is, 
judged by human standards), not many leading 
men, not many of good birth,”—but many that 
are “‘ foolish,’’? many that are “ weak,” many that 
are “‘mean and despised” (1 Cor. i. 26-28: 
Moffatt), many that are mere ciphers,—make 
up the tale of the little assemblies scattered over 


Christ Risen and Exalted 181 


the Roman world. Yet these are the Body in 
which the Lord of Glory finds His new incarnation 
—these are the Temple, slowly growing toward 
completion, in which already the God of Heaven 
makes His habitation. 


Impatient of the brittle distinctions of a fixed 
and formal ecclesiasticism, men are seeking 
to-day to interpret this conception in terms of 
Humanity itself. There is the feeling that 
‘man’? may denote something more than 
“churchman,” and that “ Humanity ” suggests 
something more vital and affluent than anything 
named in ecclesiastical terminology. And in so 
far-as-the term ‘‘ Church”? had come to be 
devitalized and mechanized, it must fail to repre- 
sent the Pauline conception ; while in proportion 
as ““ Humanity ” has been moralized and spirit- 
ualized, it approximates to it. For when we 
speak of fellowship with, and progress through, 
the common life of mankind, are we not presently 
driven by the sheer compulsion of facts along the 
pathway of the Pauline thought? What 1s 
Humanity? To speak of it as the aggregate 
of human individuals is merely an arithmetical 
definition. Morally and spiritually, Humanity 
is a movement, a prophecy, a hope. But, as a 
movement, it has not yet found its own general 


182 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


direction. The life of mankind is not a self- 
evolving circle, moving outward, in constantly 
increasing revolutions, around one great moral 
centre: it is a medley and clash of orbits, slowly, 
slowly being drawn into harmony. It is only 
here and there that the authentic Centre has been 
discovered and the invincible, true orbit swings 
out to proclaim it. Where we find this, there we 
find the movement that is Humanity. For do 
we not conceive of the race in terms of those 
sons of men who wear for us the aspect of sons of 
God? It is not to Cesar Borgia that we look but 
to St. Francis, not to “ King Bomba” but to 
Abraham Lincoln, not to Rasputin but to Gandhi. 
But if this is so—if it is our Francises and Lincolns 
and Gandhis, and kindred souls, that interpret 
to us the idea of mankind as a movement in whose 
progress we find our own fulfilment—then we 
are forced to recognize that the true Humanity 
is as yet no more than an ecclesia gathered out 
from the world of men; and the centre of that 
ecclesia is God in the person of Jesus Christ. 
It is they who share His Spirit who are the nucleus 
of that race of sons of God in whose fellowship 
and progressively unfolding life we find the full 
measure of our development. We may still 
affirm, with the most Pauline of modern dreamers, 
that Humanity is One, as God is One; that 


Christ Risen and Exalted 183 


Progress is the law of its life, and Association the 
means of progress. But then that oneness is 
possible only by the life of God supremely 
manifested in Christ, and that progress is unto 
the grace and stature of His manhood, and that 
association is in and through His Spirit, whose 
fellowship is the spiritual Society of Jesus, the 
Church of the pioneers. 


7. “'TuHe Bressep Hope.” 


Our oft-cited Italian apostle has a memorable 
passage in his writings testifying to his own great 
and fortifying hope in the ultimate sure appearing 
of the Rome of his dreams—the New Rome for 
which he had suffered the loss of all things. It 
was the dream, he tells us, of his youthful years, 
the generating idea of his every conception, 
bound up with the religion of his soul. ‘The 
Rome of the Czsars had passed; the Rome of the 
Popes would presently pass; but from the Rome 
of the People, regenerate, believing, illuminate, 
should one day spring “‘ the religious transforma- 
tion destined for the third time to bestow moral 
unity on Europe.” So he proceeds to tell us how 
he entered the city in the dusk of a March evening 
in 1849 “with a deep sense of awe, almost of 
worship ”—feeling “an electric thrill run through ” 


184 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


him, “a spring of new life.” For it seemed as 
if the fulness of the time had come, as if the City 
of his dreams had come forth from the Unapparent, 
and stood at last upon the earth. Perhaps it 
was even so. Let those decide for us who know 
how to read, discerningly and spiritually, the 
history of the Rome of 1849. It seems as if it 
were so. It seems, also, that (for certain impor- 
tant reasons set forth by continental diplomacy) 
that Dream City then made manifest was with 
some promptitude rejected, condemned and—with 
the aid of cannon and bayonets and diplomatic 
notes—sent back to the Unapparent: where 
presumably it still remains. It had been so 
dismissed some ten years before our modern 
apostle penned his memorable passage, wherein 
he records his confident, mystical hope in the 
ultimate triumphant return of that City, and 
wherein he goes on to declare that, wherever fate 
might lay his bones, he believed that on the day 
of that new advent they would know once more 
that thrill which ran through him—that “ spring 
of new life”—when in the dusk of a March 
evening in 1849 he passed through the Porta del 
Popolo. 

Is all this altogether irrelevant and without 
suggestiveness? The Rome of the Mazzinian 
faith had appeared only to be betrayed and 


Christ Risen and Exalted 185 


rejected; nevertheless he is mystically convinced 
that it shall one day gloriously return; and on the 
day of that great crisis and vindication of all the 
martyrs of the Spielberg and of a thousand 
scaffolds, dungeons and fields of battle—on that 
day his bones shall know some reminiscent, 
quickening thrill of exultation ! 


Deep in the soul of man, when once that soul 
has been touched to great and holy issues, and 
has suffered deeply, is there not always to be 
found in one form or another this invincible, 
spiritual hope, this apocalyptic of faith, this 
gospel of a Return? And so with the most sacred 
moperor all. \iFor,’?\ says Paul, :“ithe ierace’ of 
God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all 
men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and 
worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously 
and godly in this present world; awaiting the 
blessed hope of the appearing of the glory of the 
great God and of our Saviour Christ Jesus” 
(sitet. 12,013 39sec) Moflatt).) (Fhe  eraceot 
God hath appeared; so surely, and in due time, 
shall the glory of God appear also. 

For throughout Paul’s epistles, and throughout 
the nascent Life of Christ which they contain, 
there is this note of waiting, of expectancy, as 
of one who, busied with many things, is yet all 


186 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


the while listening for an appointed signal. 
And indeed, if we would learn how Paul’s growing 
knowledge of his Lord and Saviour was constantly 
criticizing and revising all Paul’s previous knowledge 
and all the preconceptions which he brought with 
him into the new faith, we can hardly do better 
than follow him in his revisions of that chapter 
of his Life of Christ which sets forth this Blessed 
Hope. ; 

For it seems as if at first Paul had not fully 
worked out all the implications of that distinction 
between the Mind of Christ and the Mind of 
Czxsar to which we have elsewhere referred 
(p. 67), or better, perhaps, between the Mind 
of Christ and the mood and temper of the Jewish 
Apocalyptic in which Paul as a Pharisee had been 
schooled. It seems a: ‘f at first it had been his 
way to offset the amazing humiliation of Christ 
in the days of His flesh with the thought of a 
swiftly approaching, imminent Day of Wrath, 
when He and His holy angels should take fiery 
vengeance upon all the troublers of His people. 
For ‘God considers it but just to repay with 
trouble those who trouble you, and repay you 
who are troubled (as well as us) with rest and 
relief, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from 
heaven together with the angels of His power in 
flaming fire, to inflict punishment on those who 


Christ Risen and Exalted 187 


ignore God, even on those who refuse obedience 
to the gospel of our Lord Jesus”? (2 Thess. i. 
6-8: Moffatt). In that swift-approaching Day 
the Lord should “ descend from heaven with a 
loud summons,” the Archangel calling, and the 
Trumpet of God sounding its dread heraldry 
of doom. Then “the dead in Christ will rise 
first, and we, the living who survive, will be caught 
up along with them in the clouds to meet the 
Lord in the air.” For when “all’s well” and 
** all 1s safe ”” were on the lips of men, then sudden 
Destruction should be upon them (1 Thess. v. 
ae tie Wiotratt): 


This, we may take it, was the tenour of Paul’s 
early preaching. Day by day he lived in expecta- 
tion of that blast of the Trumpet of God which 
should rend the heavens and awake the dead. 
He should not see death, but should behold the 
Glory of the Lord. And had not all this been 
“revealed”? in the rapt utterance of many a 
prophet, speaking in the assemblies of the saints ? 
Had it not been confirmed in many an ecstatic 
vision vouchsafed to the faithful of the Lord? 
To be sure, Paul could be critical of psychic 
“revelations” and pronouncements when these 
seemed to be contrary to moral judgment. Did 
not the disciples at Tyre counsel Paul “ through 


188 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


the Spirit ” that he “‘ should not set foot in Jerusa- 
lem ” (Acts xxi. 4, 5)? Nevertheless was he not 
constrained in his own spirit to go forward 
(Acts xx. 22), refusing to be dissuaded? Did not 
Paul “ perceive ” that the voyage to Italy would 
be with much loss “not only of the lading and 
the ship, but also of our lives” (Acts xxvii. 10)? 
and did he not, through a later revelation, revise 
his presentiment—“ for there shall be no loss of 
life among you, but only of the ship ” (Acts xxvii. 
22)? But if he could counsel the saints, while 
never disdaining prophetic revelations, to test 
them all, retaining what was good (1 Thess. v. 
20, 21: Moffatt), was it ever in his mind at that 
time that this prophetic word, the Advent 
Testimony of the saints, was itself in need of 
testing? 

But indeed our Holy Scriptures are unsparing 
of all human infallibilities; and not even our 
Apostles shall be set forth as arrayed in pontifical 
inerrancy. If at first it appears to Paul that he 
will survive, to be caught up in the clouds with 
the resurrected saints, presently that expectation 
shall fade, and he will speak freely, not of his 
ascension, but of his death. And not only so, 
but is there not observable, also, a subtle, vital 
change in his setting forth of the Blessed Hope 
itself? Does it not appear that something of the 


Christ Risen and Exalted 189 


apocalyptic imagery gradually dissolves, and with 
it something of that apocalyptic emphasis upon 
vengeance and wrath? In this matter, no doubt, 
the mind of Paul may easily elude us, andin 
our pursuit we may mistake our own mental 
shadow, or image projected upon the enveloping 
mist, for some authentic Paulinism. 


What we may be sure of in any case is that the 
Hope itself remained. The world, to Paul, was 
moving irresistibly toward a Crisis; time was 
assuredly hasting toward the Day of Christ. For 
not even the certainty of a living Christ and of a 
world invisible was enough for Paul. ‘There must 
be ever before him the assurance of a Return unto 
judgment and victory. There was always the 
inwrought conviction that Christ’s salvation must 
be on the grand scale, or not at all. It must 
mean something for the world as a world, and 
not merely for a company of elect initiates. Christ 
had come into history as such, and therefore 
history was not drifting toward some uncertain 
conclusion or non-conclusion; it was pledged to 
a divine climax. Here, on this earth, righteous- 
ness must achieve its crisis, and Christ, long 
rejected, be crowned as Lord. “Tell me that 
I am to work patiently, because in a little time my 
task will be over, and I shall enter into rest or 


190 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


enjoyment, and you seem evidently to imply that 
my work is for myself; that if this one thread of 
my destiny can be fully spun out, I shall have 
gained all I have been aiming at; which is not 
true in any sense, unless I have been living an 
utterly unchristian and detestable life; not true 
even then, since I cannot by my will sever myself 
from those with whose life, by God’s eternal law, 
mine is intertwined”? (F. D. Maurice). It was 
inevitable, then, as the great Anglican just quoted 
proceeds to show, that the inwrought conviction 
and blessed hope of the Return of the Lord unto 
world-victory should have overshadowed, in minds 
full of self-denial and ruled by a Christian view 
of God and the world, all hopes that terminated 
merely upon their own blessedness. 

And shall it be in vain—the sport of Fact, 
the jest of Time? Impalpable, the New Rome, 
against all the imposing architecture of faithless 
fact, the solid masonry of unideal reality. But 
which was, and is, the surer and mightier—the 
Rome of disillusioned Pio Nono and Continental 
diplomacy, or that other Rome, thrust back into 
the shadowy realm, the Mother City of the 
dreamers of faith who, against all hope, would 
await its sure return? Impalpable against all 
the established power and menacing actuality 
of regnant Czsar—against all the Cesars that 


Christ Risen and Exalted IgI 


have been and now are, and those yet to come— 
this Christ who shall return, this Hope of His 
Returning. But in which direction lieth the 
invincible, divine authority? 

Even so; come, Lord Jesus. 


VII 
THE LIVING CHRIST AND THE DOCTRINES OF GRACE 


We have said that, apart from the Living 
Christ, Paul had*no assurance of reconciliation, 
no doctrine of Grace, no word of Justifying 
Faith or of the Righteousness that cometh 
down from heaven. It may be well, then, before 
we conclude our present study, for us to turn to 
one or two of these outstanding doctrines of the 
Pauline evangel; for we may be very sure that 
in that Life of Christ written upon Paul’s heart 
and mind these doctrines had their own vital, 
ineradicable place. 


1. IntRopuctory.—* We know in part.” 


We may well believe that when the appointed 
presbyter read for the first time Paul’s declaration 
as to the partialism and impermanence of all 
prophesyings and of all knowledge, he paused 
long enough to make sure that here was no slip 
of the amanuensis’ pen. Paul on his own limi- 
tations as a seer and a teacher; Paul insisting 
upon the fragmentary character of mortal know- 

192 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 193 


ledge, his own included, and upon the incomplete- 
ness of all prophesyings, his own included; Paul 
confessing to a sense of bafflement and enigma; 
Paul likening all present understanding and 
doctrine and instruction to the crude thought 
and lisping prattle of children—all this made 
strange reading. It may be that even now this 
Pauline confession seems a thing to be passed over 
as hardly in keeping with dogmatic and eccle- 
siastical requirements. Have there been no suc- 
cessors of the Apostles and champions of the faith 
who would seem to have fashioned the broken 
arcs of the Pauline certitudes into the perfect 
round of a systematised infallibility? Never- 
theless, Paul is at pains to make it clear that, with 
all his visions and revelations of the Lord, and 
with the constant supply of the Spirit of God, his 
knowledge is fragmentary and his prophesyings 
fragmentary likewise. No doubt it was the 
divineness of those visions and the fulness of that 
inspiration which wrought in him that same 
conviction. 


One characteristic, then, of our present know- 
ledge, and therefore of our present teaching (says 
Paul), is their partialism. “We know bit by 

bit,” and prophesy accordingly. We do not know 
anything completely. How can we, until we 

N 


194 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


know everything completely? Our philosophies 
are broken arcs; our little systems are full of 
gaps. Our knowledge is child-knowledge—dart- 
ing out in flashes here and there, but baffled 
continually, and unable perfectly to interpret 
even its own findings. 

But Paul proceeds to put it more strikingly. 
What is this bit-by-bit knowledge of ours? He 
says it is looking-glass knowledge. “ At present 
we only see the baffling reflections in a mirror” 
(1 Cor. xiii. 12: Moffatt), What we see is the 
seeming of things—their surface-reflection—and 
we catch only such fleeting images as come 
within the angle and focus of our minds’ mirror ; 
and these same reflections frequently bewilder us. 
So says our Apostle (had he ever heard of Plato’s 
Cave?); and who will dispute him? Plato’s 
Cave or Paul’s Mirror, it is the same; and has 
philosophy attained to a clearer affirmation? 

We all recollect how Alice, taken up with her 
looking-glass and seeing the show of many things 
therein, vehemently desired to get through to 
where those engaging images lived and moved in 
their own actuality. She got through! We do 
not, for the present. We must needs deal with 
appearances. What is a flower—a tree—a moun- 
tain—a man? Who can tell? We see through 
a glass darkly. Not that the world is a palace 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 195 


of mocking illusions. Paul will make no such 
suggestion as that. ‘The universe keeps faith 
with us; and though, as Paul’s unknown disciple 
hath it, ‘ what is seen hath not been made out 
of things which do appear,” so that the essential 
stuff of reality is distinct from all outward seeming, 
yet there is a true correspondence between the 
one and the other. For as Paul himself will 
boldly put it, “‘ the invisible things of Him since 
the creation of the world are clearly seen, being 
perceived through the things that are made” 
(Rom. i. 20). Our looking-glass knowledge, then, 
is valid for us as far as it goes. God is not mocked, 
neither mocketh He any man who keepeth faith 
with his own soul. We have been set in this 
realm of shadow-play and appearance, not for 
our discomfiture, but for our schooling in the 
truth of things: as the quaint poet has written— 
We play at paste 


Till qualified for pearl : 
2 * x 2 X 


The shapes, though, were similar, 
And our new hands 

Learned gem-tactics, 

Practising sands. 


Nevertheless, to return to Paul’s figure, we are 
limited to our looking-glass. And Paul would 


clearly have us understand that, when we pass 
from the realm of common things to the higher 


196 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


reaches of knowledge, it is the same. We learn 
by pictures and semblances, here a little and there 
a little; we piece together as we may our frag- 
mentary reflections. Is it otherwise, for example, 
with our idea of God? We understand that it 
is well if a child can say, “‘ God must be like my 
father.” When presently he goes to school, there 
comes the austerer thought that God may be like 
the schoolmaster> One day he enters a Court of 
Justice and beholds the awful Presence, robed 
and pontifical, presiding there; and that night 
in bed he will wonder if God is like that Judge. 
He is looking in the looking-glass, and the reflec- 
tions baffle him; yet that mirror is going to help 
him, if he learns how to use it, and without it he 
could not learn at all. Truly, it is so with us all. 
God is great beyond all our conceiving; and to 
assemble all our authentic definitions is but to 
collect such reflections of His glory as our minds 
can mirror. Behind all the doctrine of God and 
of Christ, in that ever-unfinished Life of Christ 
written upon Paul’s heart and mind, lay the sense 
of infinite reaches of truth which he had never 
yet attained unto. ‘‘ We know in part.” Is not 
all religious knowledge a progress through symbol 
toward reality? It is mirror-work, says Paul, and 
beyond it is that state wherein we shall see, not 
by reflection, but face to face. 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 197 


Yet—let us repeat it—Paul will have us under- 
stand that there is a true correspondence between 
things as they seem and things as they are. We 
may know only in part, but we do know. Does 
not he suggest to us that, when we come to the 
higher states and intuitions of the soul, we attain 
even here to a realm of experience which belongs 
far more to reality than to surface appearance, 
far more to the eternal than to the ephemeral? 
Here in this present mortal state we may relate 
ourselves to the things that abide—that “last 
on’’; we may look through the things that are 
visible and temporal to the things which are 
unseen and eternal. 

When Paul was a little child at his mother’s 
side, and began to interpret her heart-throbs as 
she drew him to her breast, and began thus to 
understand that there was such a thing in his 
universe as Love, even that love which seeketh 
not its own and suffereth long and is kind—when 
little Saul did this, he began to lay hold upon 
something more than the outward seeming of 
things; he began to attain to something which 
belonged to the essential, eternal side of things ; 
so that in all his later years (and, we may dare to 
say, even after that final sword-stroke cleft the 
way for him through all this mortal shadow-play 
into the supreme light) he had never to unlearn 


198 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


that lesson about Love, or drop the idea of it as 
a lost illusion, or as a symbol of something other 
than itself. Love is Love; and even in its 
earthly manifestations it offers us an experience 
which passes beyond all the seeming of things 
into the eternal substance of life. It lasts on; 
it leads us into the Arcanum, into the secret place 
of the Most High. 

For in the Temple of Truth there is the 
mysterious Innermost, even the Holy of Hollies. 
There burns the Shekinah glory; there, beyond 
all seeming, is the Real, the Eternal; and in that 
Innermost dwell God and the supreme Beatified. 
Then, too, there is the Outer Court, where Faith 
begins, finding its altar of worship and of hope; 
and thither they may not come who are content 
altogether with the phantasmagoria of time and 
sense, moving in gross elements and following the 
illusions of the carnal mind. But there is also, 
between the Innermost and the Outer Court, a 
Holy Place which they may enter who have been 
priested by faith, by prayer, by sorrow; and there, 
too, they. may behold, though not the immediate 
Glory, yet a veiled shining of it, transfiguring the 
veil itself into a garment of light. Paul had come 
to that Holy Place; and his Hymn to Love is the 
song of one who had attained to the enduring 


side of life. 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 199 


But there was something more. If there had 
been nothing more, there would hardly have been 
as much. We know in part, says Paul; we dwell 
in the realm of appearance; but in this realm 
God Himself hath appeared. “ Without con- 
troversy, great is the mystery of godliness: He 
was manifested in the flesh.” Divine knowledge 
begins not with the mystic attainment of the 
soul, ascending through purgation and _ self- 
discipline to illumination; it begins with the 
self-revelation of God: and now in His supreme 
Son He hath come into this region of semblance 
and symbol. We see as in a mirror, but He 
Himself stands before it; and we behold the glory 
of God in the face of Christ Jesus. 

Dusky barbarians who have lived, and their 
fathers before them, on some lone island in un- 
frequented seas may well suppose that their little 
reef is the whole inhabited world. But one day 
a white man lands upon their shores, and dwells 
among them and learns their speech, and tells 
them of the strange world beyond the great 
waters; and from the time of his coming they 
may no longer mistake the part for the whole. 
Though as a people they may not clearly under- 
stand nor wholly believe nor greatly care, yet in 
the darkest minds there must henceforth be some 


hint of a yonderland and of knowledge beyond 


200 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


their ken ; and the tradition must remain, and the 
rumour must spread. So Christ supremely has 
brought to us and left with us the tidings of the 
Yonderland and the larger truth. We may no 
longer mistake the part for the whole, nor escape 
the rumour of eternity. 

All this was part of Saul’s gospel, written into 
that Life of Christ which he bore with him in his 
heart. For God hath “ saved us and called us 
with a holy calling, not according to our works, 
but according to His own purpose and grace, 
which was given us in Christ Jesus before times 
eternal, but hath now been manifested by the 
appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who 
abolished death, and brought life and immortality 
a AEC Piece @Auid INE sc hued best 8 nun do) 


There awaits us, then, as Paul would show, a 
Heaven for the mind, as also for the heart. We 
have before us and within us the promise of that 
state wherein our fragmentary and immature 
knowledge shall be completed in the fuller 
wisdom of the eternal years. We shall pass 
beyond this present mirror-work into immediacy 
of vision. When shall we thus attain? Paul 
does not tell us. ‘‘ Then,” says he, sweeping 
eternity with a gesture. It is idle to interrogate 
him. It is idle to ask, ‘‘ Shall we pass at once 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 201 


into the pure Absolute of truth?” What seer 
will define and annotate his visions? ‘“* There is 
a spiritual body,” says he. Does not that commit 
us still to a realm of symbol and semblance? 
With such questions we may not pursue our seer. 
It is enough for us to know that, in all his doctrine 
and counsel, Paul as a Doctor of Grace had it 
ever before him that he knew in part and 
prophesied in part, and that when that which is 
perfect should come, then that which is in part 
should be done away. And he had it ever before 
him, also, that that which is perfect should come ; 
and he would have us comfort one another with 
this word. And for the rest, it was no small 
comfort for Paul to know that he did know in 
part, and only in part. And is it otherwise with 
us? There are times when we must needs cleave 
to this same evangel of our own ignorance. If 
all the facts have now been called in, if what we 
see and feel in our poignant hours—the pain, the 
tears, the grave—marked the term of things, and 
were all there is to know, then indeed were we 
desolate. It is our comfort at all such times to 
know that we do know only in part, in broken 
fragments, and that what we see is but the 
baffling reflections in a mirror—clouded, how 
often, with sighs and tears, and shaken from its 
true angle by the shocks of grief! All this is our 


202 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


comfort, once there has been brought to us the 
rumour and hope and assurance of that know- 
ledge which passeth all understanding and is full 
of glory. ‘‘ There,” says Augustine, in his own 
Pauline way, “shall be the great Sabbath which 
has no evening. . . . There we shall rest and see, 
see and love, love and praise. ‘This is what shall 
be in the end without end.” 


2. Tue Divine SoveEREIGNTY. 


Paul’s Life of Christ is rooted in his conception 
of Grace; and his conception of Grace is rooted 
in the Sovereignty of God. Upon this doctrine 
our evangelical fathers, who, perhaps, understood 
Paul rather better than we do, dwelt much and 
often. And the doctrine is this: That God 
reigneth; that He worketh all things after the 
counsel of His own will; and that of Him and 
through Him and unto Him are all things, to 
Whom belongeth the glory for ever. And as to 
man and his salvation, God is sovereign in this 
also, since it was He who sent forth His Son, and 
since, also, all man’s repenting and believing, his 
justification and sanctification and final glory, are 
on account of the same sovereign grace of Him 
who worketh in us both to will and to do His 
good pleasure. 

All this our fathers believed and taught; and 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 203 


all this Paul believed and taught before them. 
And as for Paul, we know that this doctrine of 
the Divine Sovereignty was with him in Tarsus 
and in Jerusalem no less than in Damascus and 
Antioch and Rome; only we know also that in 
Tarsus and in Jerusalem it was as the rock of 
Kadesh before its fountains were unsealed; it 
was not until Paul came into his evangelical 
illumination that he drank of that rock and was 
refreshed. 

For the supreme demonstration of the 
sovereignty of God and of its holy purpose was 
in the life and death and exaltation of Jesus 
Christ. Paul, as we have seen, never ceased to 
marvel at his blindness and the blindness of all 
that dwelt at Jerusalem and their rulers, that 
they knew Him not, of whom all the prophets 
had testified aforetime, but desired of Pilate that 
He should be slain. But there was a greater 
marvel yet, namely, that in all their blindness 
they could do no other than fulfil all the things 
that were written of Him. For He died for our 
sins according to the Scriptures, even as according 
to the Scriptures He rose again. It was all 
according to the Scriptures, which is to say, 
according to the determinate counsel and fore- 
knowledge of God. The Jews’ rejection of Him 
and the Gentiles’ acceptance of Him were 


204 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


according to the Scriptures, and in no single event 
or circumstance of the Gospel could Paul, now 
that his eyes were enlightened, fail to see the out- 
working of the sovereign purposes of the Most 
High. Not least of all was it plain to him in 
the ordering of his own life. In the light of the 
Life of Christ there was no truth which he could 
more plainly read in his own life than this truth 
of the sovereign, electing, over-ruling purpose 


and grace of God. 


To begin, then, at the beginning: when Paul 
says “God” he means God; not a seedling 
Divinity in process of germination, or a gradually 
evolving Being in quest of “ experience,” but 
Gop, than whom Paul can think of nothing 
higher, and great beyond all his conceiving; 
Gop, the Perfection of all being, infinite in holi- 
ness and wisdom and power, who seeth the end 
from the beginning and doeth all things according 
to the purpose of His will. 

Paul will ascribe to Him all foreknowledge. 
An unprescient God, says Augustine, deeply 
learned in Paul, were no God at all. God has 
so foreknown all things as to be beyond the 
possibility of surprise or misjudgment. God so 
loved the world, not with a blind benignity that 
can be abashed, taken unawares by some un- 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 205 


expected treachery, but with an all-foreknowing 
love which, marking every apostasy, still elects to 
love. Such foreknowledge and such love Paul 
does not profess to understand. ‘“O the depth 
of the riches. .... How unsearchable . . .!” 
But God is God. 

So Paul will ascribe to Him predestinative 
purpose. Divine foreknowledge is servant to 
Divine Holiness and Grace. Every attribute of 
God is active. Whom He did foreknow them 
He also did predestinate. ‘This is not the un- 
moral fixture of fate or the coercion of almighti- 
ness; the omnipotence of God halts, self-limited, 
at the threshold of personality ; it is that election 
which belongs to the moral sovereignty of Father- 
hood, to the infinite, unfailing resourcefulness of 
Holy Love. ‘* For whom He did foreknow He 
also did predestinate, to be conformed to the 
likeness of His Son” (Rom. vill. 29). Even in 
human fatherhood is there no_ predestinative 
instinct? In us it is fallible, tentative, based on 
imperfect knowledge and limited resource, yet 
it is there; the love of parenthood is always 
predestinative in its moral impulses and solici- 
tudes. In God it is supreme, the Righteous 
Father’s foreordination of His children unto 
holiness. For Paul speaks of no other pre- 
destination of grace than that which shall lift 


206 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


our nature at last, not by constraint, but will- 
ingly, into the glory of that moral perfectness 
which is in Christ. 

Paul will also ascribe to God what our fathers 
knew as Effectual Calling. The sovereign, eternal 
purpose weaves itself into the processes of time, 
finds us, encompasses us, weaves around us its 
holy conspiracies, troubles us, lures us, draws us 
to itself. Predestination is a fact outside our 
experience; with the divine Calling we have 
ourselves to do; but always the doing begins with 
God, and in Him is continued and perfected. 
Paul, that is to say, knows nothing of that pietism 
which begins with itself, providing a formula and 
discipline to which God may be expected to 
react. ‘‘ It is God that worketh in you both to 
will and to work for His good pleasure ” (Phil. 11. 
13). “Show me,” says Luther to Erasmus, 
“any one instance of a man who through the 
pure efficacy of free will ever in the smallest 
degree either mortified his appetites or forgave 
an injury: on the contrary, I can easily show 
you that the very holy men whom you boast of 
as free-willers always in their prayers toGod .. . 
had recourse to nothing but grace, pure grace. 
So Augustine often, who is entirely on my side 
in this dispute.” And so, no less often, Paul. 


Augustine had his parable of God in Monica; 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 207 


and so, it may be, in his own mother, had Paul. 
For how does the mother pre-dedicate her child 
unborn to all that is good and honourable and 
true! And as that little life unfolds in child- 
hood and youth, how does that dedicating, pre- 
destinating mother-love weave its sacred con- 
spiracies of grace around it—its holy enticements 
to nobleness and truth! For whom she did 
pre-dedicate him she also calls. It is the way of 
mothers; it is the way of God. 


It is God, then, that justifieth also, and it is 
God that sanctifieth and it is God that glorifieth, 
even as it 1s God that foreknoweth and fore- 
ordaineth and calleth with an effectual calling. 
And Paul, with Isaiah and Jeremiah entirely on 
his side, is very bold, and speaks of the Potter 
and the clay (Rom. ix. 21). But then certain 
of our own poets have shown a like boldness— 


Ay, note that Potter’s wheel, 

That metaphor! and feel 

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay. 
* x aE * 


Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.* 
We bound dizzily to the wheel of life; but it is 
God, says our modern poet, who fixed us ’mid 
this dance of things, amending the lurking flaws, 
to turn us forth at last “‘ sufficiently impressed.” 


* Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra. 


208 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


There arises, of course, the ancient question. 
But is it not the fact, as our Calvinistic fathers 
were wont to insist, that we know we are free, 
and that we know, too, by the deepest, highest 
intuitions of the soul, that God is sovereign? 
“We assert,” says Augustine, “‘ both that God 
knows all things before they come to pass, and 
that we do by our free will whatsoever we know 
and feel to be done by us only because we will it. 
But that all things come to pass by fate we do 
not say; nay, we affirm that nothing comes to 
pass by fate.” For, says he, “it does not follow 
that, though there is for God a certain order 
of all causes, there must therefore be nothing 
depending on the free exercise of our own wills, 
for our own wills themselves are included in that 
order of causes.” Which still leaves us in a 
mystery! But then is not truth made up of 
Opposite proportions? Paul was centrally free; 
that is what made him Paul; but then, it was 
presumably not of his own choice that he was 
born a Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin, and not 
a fetish-worshipping barbarian, nor by his own 
election that he was arrested on the Damascus 
road... . “It was the good pleasure of God, 
who separated me, even from my mother’s 
womb, and called me through His grace, to reveal 
His Son in me.” We are free, and yet, when 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 209 


we try to follow out the clue of that same free- 
dom, we find ourselves saying ‘‘ God . . . God”’; 
and thus it is that the sense that we are free-born 
children of the Father and the sense that we are 
formed as clay at the Potter’s wheel can exist 
together; as it is written: ‘“‘ But now, O Lorp, 
Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou 
our potter, and we all are the work of Thy 
hand ” (Isaiah Ixiv. 8). 

And in all this is there no rest of heart in the 
knowledge that the Divine purpose is set toward 
bringing us at last into God’s ideal for us, and 
not merely into our own ideal for ourselves? In 
our best thought concerning ourselves there is 
much of egotism and error; we know only 
imperfectly what it is that we ought to be: but 
the Divine foreordaining grace marks us for 
God’s own thought for us, and therein lies our 
peace. It is not to be denied, indeed, that men 
and nations may oppose the purposes of God; 
what our fathers denied, and Paul, also, is that 
where Grace abounds, Sin, which is self-will, 
shall much more abound; what they denied is 
that in the end, when the long history shall be 
summed up, it shall be said: “Sin reigns.” 
They put it all the other way, declaring that first 
Gana) last it must be said, ‘God reigns)’ Grace 


reigns.” For whom He did foreknow He also 
+07 


210 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


did predestinate, and whom He did predestinate 
them He also called, and whom He called them 
He also justified; and step by step, through 
many a conflict and dark rebellion, and through 
the central, crimson tragedy of all, the Divine 
purpose moves forward to its sure fulfilment. 

‘¢ Gather in thine elect,” prays Mr. Spurgeon, 
‘and then, O Lord, elect some more!” : which 
serves to show that there is a dark side to the 
Pauline doctrine, and that the devout mind may 
flinch from its own logic. Does not Paul himself 
flinch from it, raising the impetuous, austere 
question: ‘‘ What if God, willing to show His 
wrath . . .?”? (Rom. ix. 22); and then, with an 
angel-touch upon the loins of his logic, proceeding 
haltingly to the blessedly lame conclusion : 
“What if God, willing to show His wrath... 
endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath 
fitted unto destruction?”?? Upon that darker 
side Paul will not dwell, disrelishing, as it were, 
his own thought, and coming to his doxology 
only when he has concluded: “ God hath shut 
up all unto disobedience, that He might have 
mercy upon all” (Rom. xi. 33 et seg.). And so 
Mr. Spurgeon in his Tabernacle will pray his 
strange prayer, with Luther to comment upon it 
in advance; for, says Luther, the prayer and 
affection and practice of a good man may have 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 211 


more of divine truth in them than all his dis- 
putation and polemic. Andi if there is, as indeed 
the Scriptures show, that darker side to the 
Divine Sovereignty, yet the darkest of the dark- 
ness is not so dark but it has this light shining 
at the heart of it, That the Judge of all the earth 
shall do Right, and that He who is the Potter 
to our clay is also the Father of our spirits. 


But all this we have considered principally 
because it belongs to the rootage of Paul’s whole 
conception of the Gospel and of the life of Christ. 
It is all of grace, for it is all of God; and God is 
sovereign, sovereign in Creation, sovereign in 
Redemption, sovereign beyond Redemption in 
that consummation of all things wherein He shall 
be all in all. 

Less than this can we ourselves believe? If 
there is no assured Eternal Sovereignty in the 
universe, but only a struggling and harassed God, 
of whom the best that may be said is that he 
means well—a God who has got into strange 
difficulties in trying to realize himself, and must 
needs be helped out through the good endeavour 
of his creatures—then are we not bound with him 
in shallows and in miseries? A harassed God and 
- an unintelligible world were too great a burden 
for us to bear. Our hearts cry out for Him who 


212 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


liveth and reigneth for ever. It is the assurance 
of that holy Sovereignty which alone can embattle 
our hearts against the shocks of the World and 
of Time and of the Devil. 


3. Law anp GRACE. 


The Life of Christ in His saints is interpreted 
by Paul as an experience of Grace, as distinct 
from the experience of Law. 

Every man, according to Paul, is born under 
Law—the Jew admittedly, for he had Moses ; 
but the Gentile also, for he showed the word of 
the Law written upon his heart. 

And so our Scandinavian forefathers, feeling 
after a like conception, would tell their children 
of the three mysterious Sisters who sought to the 
cradle of Helgi at his birth—the three Sisters 
with their three fateful tablets whereon with pen 
of iron the future of young Helgi was to be 
inscribed. And the last of these Sisters was 
Weird, which is Fixed Destiny, and the second 
Werdandi, which signifies Becoming; but the 
first of the ‘Three was Skuld, which is Obligation 
(whence, according to some, our English 
“‘ should”). And indeed the shadow of Skuld, 
of Duty, does fall upon every cradle; and accord- 
ing to what is foreknowingly written concerning 
a man on that first tablet, be it obedience or 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 213 


truancy, will be the nature of what is inscribed 
next upon that tablet which records what he is 
becoming, and at last, with relentless iron pen, 
upon that dread tablet which records what he 
shall finally and fixedly have become. At least, 
that is always and everywhere the language of the 
Law. Skuld comes first. Duty—Obligation— 
this, said our northern forebears, is the first and 
great word uttered over every child of earth. 
Skuld, said the Norsemen, Nomos, says Paul; it 
is much the same. 

In our modern world, as we know, this con- 
ception of the universality of Law is variously 
emphasized or slighted. In the realm of science, 
and regarded as the expression of the eternal 
consistency of Nature, it is fully accredited; in 
society, and regarded as the expression of the 
supremacy of Duty over Interest, of moral prin- 
ciple over utilitarian expediency, it is doubtfully 
received ; in religion, and regarded as the formu- 
lation of didactic Righteousness, it is still largely 
proclaimed as in itself an evangel sufficient for 
all moral and spiritual purposes. Are we not at 
times content to interpret Christ Himself as our 
highest and divinest Law? 

As to our social and political life, it may be that 
in the good providence of God there will yet be 
given to us another John the Baptist, crying in 


214 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


this greater wilderness of Europe and calling us 
back to that true, righteous Authority and 
universal Duty without which our national and 
international affairs become a fracas of contending 
interests, and our statesmanship a mere gamble 
upon the roulette-whirligig of events. For the 
present, as a modern seer has said, although here 
and there in this disordered Europe of ours 
“some dissatisfied thinker may have sought a 
path . . . into the realm of ethics, the realm of 
the purely human, the realm of the absolute, such 
men of might have never been honoured as the 
solar centres’? of our modern ameliorative and 
economic movements, ‘‘ but have invariably been 
accorded a scant esthetic toleration, as dull and 
lesser lights.”” Hence Paul has become a problem 
for theologians rather than a prophet in a living 
world. “In the centre of the stage atheistic 
materialism has been enthroned,” its strength 
lying not in moral law nor yet in love, “ but in 
discipline,” its revelation not “the ideal, but 
atilityy? 

In the providence of God, then, we may yet 
have our new Prophet of Fire who shall proclaim 
the Law to us and shall be heard. Every child 
of Adam under the Law, every class under it, 
every nation likewise; all our apparatus of 

* See Walther Rathenau; Jn Days To Come, p. 57. 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 215 


government properly an instrument for the 
furthering of this same eternal Law; our whole 
Humanity set here on this planet for no other 
purpose but unitedly and progressively to seek 
it out and fulfil it—surely we have need to be 


called back to all this. 


But when we have got thus far, what will | 
happen? When throughout all classes and 
peoples this sense of regnant Duty, of common 
obligation under the Law prevails, what will 
happen? 

According to Paul, what will happen is that 
something will break down; and it will not be 
the Law. 

According to Paul, we have yet to face the 
stubborn Human Fact; and that fact seems to 
be that, whilst our fundamental human duties 
are written upon our hearts already, the trouble 
is that we do not do them, and that not all the 
proclaiming of them in the world, vehemently to 
be desired though that may be, can ever be more 
than a necessary piece of schooling to lead us on 
to something far greater and better. 

This, indeed, is a point which we are slow 
enough to take. ‘Find me,” said Abraham 
Lincoln, ‘‘a Church which stands for the two 
great commandments of love for God and love 


216 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


for our neighbours, and knows no other creed 
but that sublime summary of human duty; and 
I will join it heart and soul.” And so there have 
been those who have nobly bidden us proclaim 
the Duties of Man, so sure that education in 
those complete duties, followed by appropriate 
performance, would bring in the golden years. 
Followed by appropriate performance! But 
therein lies the. human problem. Paul would 
apparently object that merely to go to men and 
tell them that their supreme duty was to love 
God and their neighbours would be a piece of 
moral pedagoguery, in itself inadequate to the 
situation. 

Duty? The Law? It is a hammer which 
smashes our idols and lays our glory in the dust. 
If, indeed, a man have a niggling conception of 
Duty, so that for him it means hardly more than 
living within the accepted proprieties, then he 
may cultivate an easy complacency, and fancy 
that his virtuous, sublime head is among the 
stars: but if the whole-souled, whole-hearted 
love of God and Humanity be duty, then how 
high and how stern are those same stars above 
him—myriad eyes of solemn scrutiny and rebuke ! 
A heroic and poetic love for Humanity is not 
without allurement, for Humanity in the abstract 
can be conceived without the irritating and 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 217 


frustrating idiosyncrasies of individual men and 
women; even its sins, being general and viewed 
on the grand scale, have about them a certain 
tragic appeal; they are not mean and provoking, 
like the faults of our neighbours. But then it is 
not with Humanity in the abstract that we have 
to do. We cannot lay our hands on its mighty 
shoulders and say, “Il love thee.” It is in our 
neighbour that the race stands before us. We 
touch Humanity only through men and women ; 
and if we love not our neighbour, whom we have 
seen, of what value is our love for Humanity, 
which we have not seen? It is our neighbour, 
however, who discomfits us. Often we are ill- 
sorted; and what if he be unneighbourly, un- 
lovely, spiteful, dull? It is here the Law searches 
us. And then, how often is our love even for the 
excellent of the earth itself a sort of egoism, an 
investment at high interest? 

So that the Law, according to Paul, is our 
schoolmaster, to humble us and drill us in the 
hard and bitter lesson of our own insufficiency ; 
and in the day when the nations convoke their 
long overdue solemn assembly to consider this 
whole matter of their duty to God and to man— 
in that day they shall learn what Paul learned 
some two millenniums ago, namely, that there is 
something which the Law cannot do, which 


218 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


legislation cannot accomplish; and that not by 
reason of any inherent imperfection, but by reason 
of the Human Fact, the fatal warp, the infirmity 
and incapacity of man. ‘“‘ What the Law could 
not do,” says Paul in a memorable passage. 
What could it not do? It could not get itself 
done. 

It is true, there is a sense in which history and 
experience appear to contradict so sweeping a 
generalization. [he Law does in a measure get 
itself done. ‘* Forasmuch,” says Luther, “as the 
Law stayeth us with the threatenings and promis- 
ings thereof, we do often abstain from evil things 
and do those things which are good; howbeit 
we do them not for the love of goodness and 
hatred of evil. ...” Paul himself will recognize 
as much. He who is under the Law, says he, is 
a servant, not a son. And even so, a servant 1s 
one who serves with some measure of obedience. 
Moreover, in every age there have been those who, 
being servants, have yet not been hirelings, but 
have laboured with the devotion of sons. Is 
there not in every heart some invigorating inter- 
penetration of the Divine Will, some capacity for 
response to it for its own sake? But Paul is 
thinking of that obedience to the Law which is 
a deep, inward, secure, all-justifying fulfilment 
of its righteousness; and that, he says, shall not 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 219 


be found in us. ‘“ Do not write to me,” says 


Mazzini, “about ‘the consciousness of having 
done my best!’”? It would seem that the soul 
most deeply learned in Duty is least likely to find 
enduring satisfaction in its own meritorious 
fidelities. 

And, according to Paul, it is when we are 
brought to this pass, recognizing that it is not in 
us to ground our peace upon our own justifying 
righteousness, that we are ready to receive that 
other Word which the Law can never utter. 
We begin to feel our need of a Religion of 
Humanity which shall bring to us something 
more than a lofty and exacting rule of life—a 
religion which shall speak to our actual condition, 
and meet our inmost need. We feel our need of 
a Word concerning God which shall tell us, not 
that the Law does not matter and that our out- 
lawry need not trouble us (which were to con- 
demn us to a pale inferno), but that back of the 
holiness of the Law and our own inward incom- 
petence there is that in the nature of God which 
can yet holily meet our case, and open to us the 
way of peace and righteousness. We feel our 
need of a religion of redemption. 

And this it was that proclaimed itself to Paul 
when the Life of Jesus Christ came to be written 
upon Paul’s heart. ‘There is indeed, as we have 


220 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


said, a way of regarding Christ by which He, too, 
appears as but a new and demanding embodiment 
of the Law, set before us for our despairing 
imitation. ‘The moral perfectness of the historic 
Jesus, viewed by itself, becomes such a Law unto 
us, higher than Sinai, awful in the pure, cold 
whiteness of its unattainable summit. But it was 
not so that Paul learned Christ. He knew Him 
as the mediator of the new Covenant, the wounded 
One whose wounds were the seal and pledge of 
uplifting grace. In Christ crucified and exalted 
Paul came to see that God is for us, though our 
own sins and our own hearts and our own con- 
demning conscience cry that He is against us. 
He is for us, and He is for the Law also; He is 
for us without rift or schism in His inexorable 
holiness ; He is Just, and in His justice He is the 
justifier of the ungodly. All this Paul came to 
read in that Life of Christ written savingly upon 
his heart; for the first, supreme message of that 
Life was that at the heart of the Divine Holiness 
was Fatherhood, Priesthood, Atonement, and that 
henceforth Paul might take up the Law, not as 
a servant, but as a son, not in order to earn accept- 
ance, but because he was accepted—bought back, 
reconciled, the child of the Divine Sorrow, of 
the Eternal Love. ‘The kindness of God our 


Saviour, and His love toward man, appeared, not 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace. 221 


by works done in righteousness, which we did 
ourselves; but according to His mercy He saved 
us, through the washing of regeneration and 
renewing of the Holy Ghost, which He poured 
out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our 
Saviour; that, being justified by His grace, we 
might be made heirs according to the hope of 
eternal life” (Tit. ii. 4-7). And from that 
hour, when Paul learned what Grace meant, 
reading that lore in the wounds of Jesus—from 
that hour he knew that it had pleased God to 
commit unto him the faith of the future, which 
should grow and fill the earth. For there are in 
religion these two things which cannot be shaken : 
the Law of God, that commands us, and the 
(Spicer of (cod, thatiredeems (us; and) sévery 
earthly government and tradition shall be shaken 
until that sure commonwealth shall at last arise 
which is built upon that foundation, patterning 
after the authority of God’s Law, which com- 
mands a perfect righteousness, and the passion of 
His Grace, which seeks and saves the lost. ‘To-day, 
indeed, “‘ the tears of faith ”? may be “‘ dried up 
in the fire of the mechanistic will”? *—in the 
fire, that is to say, of that zeal which impels man 
forward, not toward any kingdom of righteous- 
ness, but toward some mechanical, makeshift 
* Rathenau, In Days To Come, p. 285. 


222 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


state, the outgrowth of the material mind wherein 
the soul is overlooked and forgotten; but the 
soul of mankind takes its own sure revenge of all 
systems and eras that would contemn it, and in 
the day when man’s soul shall awake in Europe, 
the Law shall once more be our tutor, to bring 
us unto Christ, that we may be justified by faith. 


4. JUSTIFICATION BY Fattu. 


We are justified, says Paul, by faith. That is 
to say, the life of Christ in the heart of man begins 
as an experience of reconciliation to God; and 
this experience includes an assurance of acquittal 
and reinstatement. And as for this assurance, it - 
is not to be wrought out of any disciplinary exer- 
cises or meritorious deeds which a man himself 
may perform, nor by means of any esoteric formula 
or trick of consciousness, but comes of an act of 
faith, by which a man steps out of experience, 
and casts himself upon God. 

It may be, indeed, that there has grown up in 
our time the suspicion that Paul made more of 
this doctrine than we have need to make of it. 
There is the notion that it was rightly important 
for Paul as a Jew, in continual conflict with the 
old juridical and ceremonial conception of religion 
and in expectation of an imminent Divine Assize, 
but that it is somewhat off the main line of things 


Christ and the Doctrines of LSP dCe Maes 


for us. However, the historical, evangelical fact 
appears to be that sooner or later we have to return 
to it. Paul’s doctrine was verified first of all in 
his own experience and in that of the Church of 
his day. Notably, it was verified anew by Luther, 
to become the creative word of a new era. It 
received a fresh authentication in the Evangelical 
Revival. ‘‘ Generally,” says John Wesley, ‘‘ when 
these [evangelical] truths, justification by faith 
in particular, were declared . . . after a few days 
or weeks there came suddenly on the great con- 
gregation . . . a violent and impetuous power 
which— 
Like mighty wind or torrent fierce 
Did then oppressors all o’errun.”’ 

Dale thought he detected in Moody’s later preach- 
ing a shifting of emphasis from justifying faith to 
repentance, and to repentance ‘“‘as though it 
were a doing of penance instead of a metanoia” ; 
and he believed that it impaired the evangelist’s 
effectiveness. ‘‘ In 1875 he preached in a manner 
which produced the sort of effect produced by 
Luther, and provoked similar criticism. . . . Men 
leaped out of darkness into life, and lived a Chris- 
tian life afterwards. ‘The ‘do penance’ preach- 

ing has had no such results ”’ (Letter to Dr. Wace, 
1884: see Life of Dale, p. 530). It is strange 


how, through succeeding ages, this Pauline 


224 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


doctrine has broken out anew, to re-orientate 
the thought and re-fashion the lives of men. 
The human fact, then, seems to be, that if there 
is one thing above everything else to which men 
are for ever returning, it is this matter of justifi- 
cation. We are for ever seeking to get on good 
terms with ourselves, with conscience, with 
memory, with the ghosts that trouble us, with 
God; and the lawyer mentioned in the Gospels 
who, ‘willing to justify himself,’ posed his 
ingenious question, is own brother to us all. 
We have, it seems, the ineradicable feeling that 
things have gone wrong—that we have gone wrong. 
We have the feeling that sooner or later we must 
face ourselves. We know, also, that we must face 
other people—not simply socially and with wordy 
by-play, but in some deeper and more searching 
way; and with most of us there are some people 
whom, for shame’s sake, we had rather not meet 
again. So there is the past,—the past which 
ought not to have been, and that other, perhaps 
more rebuking, past which ought to have been, 
and might have been, but which we have put out 
of the way. What if after all we can put nothing 
finally and irrevocably out of the way? What if 
the past is solemnly revocable? What if some- 
where in God’s great universe these things await 
us to confront us again? So, too, there is the 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 225 


future—the future which, with its relentless 
logic, exposes all our fallacies, and carries our follies 
and worse than follies to their damning conclu- 
sion. And thus, within and beneath and beyond 
all, there is the feeling, variously interpreted, that 
we must meet God. It is not perhaps the fear of 
a dread Assize, wherein we shall be arraigned for 
our bold rebellions; it is rather the haunting fear 
that, in the supreme solitude and silence of Truth, 
our sins shall appear, not as audacious treasons, 
but as things squalid and abject and inexpressibly 
mean. There is even the fear of the Divine 
Forgiveness. . . . 

In one way or another, then, we are all seeking 
to come to terms with conscience and with life. 
We would fain arrive at some state of justifica- 
tion; it may be by dramatic expiations, or by 
attempting to depress our ideals to the level of 
our attainments, or by advantageous self-com- 
parison with our fellows, or by divers inventions 
of the subtle mind. Sometimes it may seem to us 
as if we have drawn ourselves up to the very edge 
of attainment—as if we were holding on, breath- 
less, to the crumbling verge of ultimate satisfac- 
tion—as if but one more effort were needed to set 
our feet upon steadfast ground; nevertheless 
Paul’s word finds us in the end: ‘‘ We have all 


Ma ercome shorte soc 
P 


226 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


But, according to Paul, it is through the recog- 
nition of this very fact that the divine life in the 
soul is begun—that Christ is formed within us. 
We are justified, says he, by faith—by the faith, 
that is to say, which lays hold upon that right- 
eousness perfectly wrought out for us in the very 
heart and nature of God, and freely bestowed in 
Jesus Christ. For according to Paul’s gospel, for 
a man to look believingly to Jesus Christ, in whom 
God hath commended His love to the world, was 
for that man at once to be freely justified from all 
things, and to have peace with God and access 
unto all grace, and to rejoice in the hope of the 
glory yet to be revealed; so that henceforth he 
should work, not toward a fair standing with God, 
but by reason of it, and not upon a fair hope of 
acceptance, but upon the assurance of it; always 
coming back to this—that that good standing and 
that assurance rested not at all upon his own gifts 
and graces, nor upon any state interior to himself 
whatsoever, save only that faith which cast him 
wholly upon the name and nature and covenant- 
promises of God in Christ. There was, indeed, 
nothing that was so much to the mind of Paul 
as to stand before sinful but Christward-turning 
men and lavish upon them these evangelical 
encouragements, nor was there a sotted libertine 
or vice-stricken slave, nor yet a blameless stoic or 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 227 


immaculate Pharisee, to whom he was not pre- 
pared to proclaim justification complete, immediate 
and eternal, as the free gift of God that cometh 
by faith and by faith alone. He was prepared to 
do so because in that very way it had pleased God 
to reveal His Son in Paul himself; and thus he 
knew by experience that Justifying Faith was but 
another name for the advent and life and ministry 
of the Living Christ in the heart of man. 


We understand, therefore, that in all this Paul 
speaks, not as a schoolman with a theory to pro- 
pound, but as an apostle with good news to pro- 
claim. Salvation, as he is careful to show, is not 
an abstruse thing, an engaging problem for the 
erudite ; but “ whosoever calleth upon the name 
of the Lord shall be saved.” Nevertheless his 
doctrine of Justification by Faith is not simply a 
bow in the cloud, a word in the air, a pronounce- 
ment to be repeated upon authority; but he is 
prepared to contend for it as pillared upon sound 
judgment, a doctrine rationally related to his whole 
conception of God and the world. 

For one thing, it is all of a piece with his 
understanding of that vital principle of substantial 
and legal and moral union which unites all the 
generations of the children of men. 

“You are you, and J am I”; but that, Paul 


228 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


would say, is by no means the whole story. Not so 
easily may we rid ourselves of each other. We 
are not apart, like pebbles tossed together in the 
tidal flow; we are one, like waves in the com- 
munion of the great deep. 

Paul is never able, for instance, to dissociate 
himself in his mind from far-off Father Adam 
standing there on the dim margin of the world 
and outlined against the dawn of time. Adam’s 
fall, it seems, was more than Adam’s fall; it was 
Paul’s also, and so with every other child of Adam’s 
errant race. There is a vital continuum. ‘The 
many are involved in the one, the one in the many. 
And has the passing of the centuries brought 
discredit upon this whole conception? No doubt 
we have now decided that Father Adam is a 
personage somewhat more remote and elusive than 
Paul was disposed to believe. Do we not prefer 
to speak of the Dawn Man—ELoanthropos ? But if 
it pleases us to say EHoanthropos where Paul says 
Adam, what of the difference? Paul’s doctrine 
remains. Who to-day can unravel the web of 
personal and social responsibility interwoven about 
every smallest act? ‘There is no isolated deed or 
desire ; but somehow all human history is involved 
in it. Dawn Man and twentieth-century man, 
we are bound up together. “A man,” says 
Emerson, working from very different premises, 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 229 


but reaching the Pauline conclusion, “‘ is the whole 
encyclopedia of facts. ‘The creation of a thou- 
sand forests is in one acorn; and Egypt, Greece, 
Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already 
in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, 
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely 
the application of his manifold spirit to the mani- 
fold world.” ‘There is no religion,” says our oft- 
quoted Italian prophet, “ without faith in the 
solidarity of the human race”’—nor yet, as he 
will show, an intelligible basis for any ethic higher 
than the ethic of the jungle. So we come back 
to Paul. ‘In Adam all die.”? The Dawn Man, 
dreaming and waking, questing and questioning, 
learning to put names to things, and communing 
in his own wondering way with earth and heaven 
—the Dawn Man fell, listening, it would seem, to 
some inferior and cunning voice that spoke against 
the high voice which held the secret of his voca- 
tion. In some such way the Dawn Man let us 
down: we have been letting one another down 
ever since. It is not the whole picture; but Paul 
will affirm it as part of the picture. 


In the teachings of Paul’s Master we have an 
extension and further application of this same 
principle of affinity and solidarity. It is an appli- 
cation of a challenging sort, and one which Paul 


230 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


himself, if he had the Saying before him, must 
often have pondered. “‘ He that receiveth [wel- 
cometh| a prophet in the name of a prophet shall 
have a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth 
[welcometh] a righteous man in the name of a 
righteous man shall have a righteous man’s reward” 
(Matt. x. 41). Does not this appear an arbitrary 
imputation of moral values beyond all justifica- 
tion? But what if the prophet and his host, the 
righteous man and he who receives him, are not 
two, but one? What, that is to say, if between 
them there is some deep underlying affinity and 
moral union? It is no light thing to discern a 
prophet while yet he is an innovator at large; 
no light thing to welcome him whose words are 
battles, and whose presence brings with it the 
rumour and challenge of war. To do so argues a 
certain kinship of spirit. Paul himself could never 
forget how the Galatians had welcomed him, nor 
what it argued as to the kinship of their own spirits. 
** Although it was because of an illness . . . that 
I preached the gospel to you on my former visit, 
and though my flesh was a trial to you, you did 
not scoff at me nor spurn me; you welcomed me 
like an angel of God, like Christ Jesus. You con- 
gratulated yourselves” (Gal. iv. 13, 14: Moffatt). 
Does not the prophet, so welcomed, stand for 
that attitude and faith and character which his 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 231 


welcomers would fain attain unto? Does not the 
righteous man, so received and rejoiced in, stand 
for that righteousness which his disciple would 
appropriate? And although that be but desire 
in the one which is attainment in the other, yet 
is not such desire the seed of attainment, and shall 
not God read the harvest in the grain? 

A strange world this, then. The prophet 1s 
more than himself: the righteous man is more 
than himself: they who receive them are more 
than themselves. ‘There are subtle contacts, inter- 
penetrations, correspondences, affinities. It is so 
throughout life. No man, says Paul, liveth to 
himself, nor may he perform even that last 
and most individual and isolative act of death 
without involving others. He must die, also, 
socially. 


It is at this point that Paul finds the saving 
truth concerning the life and death and exaltation 
of Jesus. For Christ belongs not less to all men 
than does Adam or any son of Adam since the 
world began; and if there is this wide com- 
monalty and partnership in transgression and 
failure, there is also the same in obedience and 
righteousness. If Adam is Everyman, then is 
Christ Everyman, too; and all His obedience and 
righteousness are for the race. 


232 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


And this is not to suggest a mere mechanical or 
legal interpretation. After all, we have shared a 
common failure in the Dawn Man, not merely 
because we are united with him in psychic sub- 
stance, or in legal status, but, according to Paul, 
because we have all in very fact put ourselves in 
line with him. ‘“ Death hath passed upon all 
men for that all have sinned,” even though all 
have not sinned’ after the similitude of Adam’s 
transgression. In the same sense—that is, by a 
personal act—we must put ourselves in line with 
God’s Righteous Man. We must receive Him— 
welcome Him. And what is this receiving of 
Christ, this casting of ourselves upon Him, this 
cry for Him, this drawing of the heart toward 
Him, but the evidence that that all-justifying 
righteousness which in Him is in perfect fruition 
is already in our own hearts as the quickened seed, 
itself the gift of God, whereof the harvest shall be 
hereafter ? 

Make Christ, then, and not the Dawn Man your 
Everyman, says Paul in effect. Claim your kin- 
ship in Him. Recognize that He belongs to you 
and you to Him. Live in that faith, and He 
Himself will inhabit it and will live in you. 


But then how far do our little annotations and 
explanations of Paul fall short of his vision and 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 233 


passion! How apt we are to fritter away his 
inspiration with our petty ingenuities of exposi- 
tion! And especially when it comes to expound- 
ing Grace. Until Grace in our theorizings becomes 
no more Grace, but some strange alloy—some 
Divine recognition, perhaps, of our own inherent 
but not yet developed righteousness. Yet let us 
be very sure that, whenever we come to that, Paul 
must break out upon us. For it is not by God’s 
faith in our own inherent and germinal righteous- 
ness that we are justified, but by our faith in God’s 
complete and perfect righteousness, freely be- 
stowed and vitally communicated in Christ. And 
even if in its outworking in our own experience 
it must be by our will and endeavour, and there- 
fore to that extent our own, yet even so, and as if 
against the testimony of our very consciousness, 
it is all of God and all of grace. For, as Sweden- 
borg in his mystical philosophy hath it, it is not 
possible for the Lord, as Love and Wisdom, to 
indwell any moral being, unless he who so receives 
love and wisdom feels them to be his own; other- 
wise he were no more than the conduit of a life 
with which he had no vital relation: and yet, 
so far as he believes that he possesses these things 
from himself, so far he denies his true nature, for 
he denies in effect that his life comes from the 
Lord. For in truth, “ the union of the Lord with 


234 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


man and of man with the Lord takes place by means 
of those things which are the Lord’s in him” (“ The 
Divine Love and Wisdom,” Part II., par. 115, 
116). And so Paul: “For by grace have ye 
been saved through faith; and that not of your- 
selves ; it is the gift of God. . . . For we are His 
workmanship’ (Eph. ii. 8, 9). If, then, that 
faith by which we receive God’s Righteous One 
is unto justification, because it witnesses to our 
nascent affinity with Him, bearing in itself the 
seed of a righteousness yet to be revealed, it is 
none the less of grace; for we are joined to Him 
by means of that which is the Lord’s in us. 


So to return: we need to be justified. We are 
burdened; we are full of dispeace. Would we 
then justify ourselves? Would we come boldly 
to the tribunal of our own conscience, and of that 
supreme, ultimate Conscience of sovereign right- 
eousness, and claim the merited award of approval 
and peace? Not by that way has peace ever 
come to any soul of man. What flashes and 
delusive gleams of hope have ever encouraged us 
upon that road have been like the witches’ flat- 
teries in Macbeth, winning us with honest trifles 
to betray us in deepest consequence. Yet if this 
be a moral and not simply a sentimental universe, 
there is no other way open for us save one, and 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 235 


that the way that is not of our own making— 
even the way of grace. 

And, interpret it as we may, the fact remains 
that for Paul the Life of Jesus Christ in His saints 
begins and continues in an act and attitude of 
faith—even the relying, against all the habits 
and subterfuges of the mind, for our acceptance 
with God solely upon the foundation of what He 
has provided out of His own nature; the cleaving 
to an experience which is not our own, but 
Christ’s, but which yet is verily ours in Him. 
So for Paul, Faith is but another name for Christ ; 
it is His heart-name, the name by which He lives 


in the hearts of His people. 


Moreover, in these days, when we have a proper 
concern to bring every doctrine to the test of its 
social applications, it remains to be added that this 
doctrine of Justification by Faith has applications 
and implications that are searching and far-reach- 
ing enough. For we are to be imitators of God, 
even of Him that justifieth the ungodly. Have 
we been wronged? Have we been defrauded? 
Has any nation wrought iniquity against our 
nation—any class against our class? ‘Then it is 
for us, the aggrieved party, to take the reconciling 
initiative, seeking the justification of the trans- 
gressors. Not, indeed, of their transgression ; 


236 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


how condemnable that is we must show them by 
taking the burden of it upon ourselves, and pay- 
ing homage in our every act to that righteousness 
which it has violated. But we must seek to justify 
them, to provide them with a new approach to us, 
a new standing with us, until, through their quick- 
ened discernment of our good-will, they are put 
out of conceit with their offences against us, and 
come to believe in us and to share our spirit. A 
hard way, surely !—so hard that no nation, almost 
no community, has ever attempted the like. 
According to Paul, it is the way of the Cross. 


5. Cue Girr or RIGHTEOUSNESS. 


“Whoever thinks he can rely on outward 
privilege,” says Paul, in one of his great auto- 
biographical passages, “‘ I can outdo him. I was 
circumcized on the eighth day after birth; I 
belonged to the race of Israel, to the tribe of 
Benjamin; I was the Hebrew son of Hebrew 
parents, a Pharisee as regards the Law, in point of 
ardour a persecutor of the church, immaculate by. 
the standard of legal righteousness. But for 
Christ’s sake I have learned to count my former 
gains a loss; indeed, I count anything a loss com- 
pared to the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus 
my Lord. For His sake I have lost everything 
(I count it all the veriest refuse) in order to gain 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 237 


Christ and be found. . . in Him, possessing no 
legal righteousness of my own, but the righteous- 
ness of faith in Christ, the divine righteousness that 
rests on faith” (Phil. ui. 4-9: Moffatt). And 
concerning this “‘ divine righteousness that rests 
on faith,” the first and principal thing is that it is 
of God, even of Him who calleth the things that 
are not as though they were, and, being of God, 
is reckoned unto us. For Abraham, who is the 
spiritual father of all them that believe, being 
fully assured that what God had promised He 
was able to perform, believed God; and his faith 
was reckoned unto him for righteousness. Now 
it was not written for his sake alone that it was 
reckoned unto him; but for our sake also, unto 
whom it shall be reckoned, who believe on Him 
that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was 
delivered for our trespasses and was raised for our 
justification. 


Our Evangelical fathers, as we know, were much 
taken with this doctrine ; and they knew it by the 
name of Imputed Righteousness. And the doc- 
trine as they interpreted it was this: that there is 
another righteousness which a man may wear 
besides that of his own weaving; and that other 
and better and most glorious righteousness is the 
righteousness of Jesus Christ, woven throughout 


238 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


of His own obedience. Of a man’s own righteous- 
ness, woven of his own outward correctness and 
blamelessness, our Evangelical fathers had a poor 
opinion. They held that it was a livery quite 
unpresentable before God, the stuff of it poor in 
warp and woof; but the righteousness of Christ 
was perfect. And as Justification is an act of 
God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our 
sins and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, so 
the Imputation of Righteousness is an act of that 
same free grace, wherein God imputeth to us the 
righteousness of Christ, received by faith alone. 
Every man, therefore (said our fathers), who is 
united by faith to Jesus Christ is apparelled in the 
white and glistering raiment of His perfectness, 
and is accepted in the Beloved. 

Our fathers, it seems, got this doctrine from the 
Apostle Paul, by way of Augustine and Luther; 
and Paul got it in part from the Old Testament 
and in part from the Gospel tradition, and in part, 
no doubt, from his own reasonings and reveries 
and communings with his living Lord. And one 
is disposed to believe that it was a doctrine which 
lay very near to Paul’s heart. As we read his 
Epistle to the Romans and his Second Epistle to 
the Corinthians and, again, his Epistle to the 
Galatians, we see for ourselves how he delights to 
dwell upon this righteousness which is by faith— 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 239 


this gift of righteousness, this righteousness which 
is Christ’s and is reckoned unto us. Itis more than 
possible that Paul, being such a man as he was, 
could hardly have endured at all, had it not been 
that he had this assurance that in God’s sight he 
stood already in the perfectness of Christ. It 
is more than possible, that is to say, that this 
doctrine, in so far as it was wrought out by the 
Apostle at all, was wrought out of the necessities 
of his own heart and conscience, and out of his 
consciousness that God was meeting those necessi- 
ties out of His own fulness in Christ. Perhaps it 
is not too much to say that, morning by morning, 
this was Paul’s waking thought, and, night by 
night, it was the pillow on which he laid his head 
—this, and the warrior-joy of his vocation as one 
under orders from the living God. 


Now we have already seen that Paul was not 
easily brought to this state of mind. There was 
a time when he was full of the notion of his good 
family, and his exemplary upbringing, and his 
outwardly blameless life, and his correct opinions 
and practices. In all these things he had carried 
his head very high, and would have scorned the 
idea of wearing any other righteousness than was 
spun and woven of this material. What came in 
to discomfit him was his sense of interior failure 


240 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


before the intense demands of the spiritual Law. 
‘“‘Sin sprang up, and I died.” “I died.” No 
word shall we find more poignant than that to set 
forth the fatal woe of a heart torn by inward 
schism. And so in the fulness of time and in his 
utter extremity, the Lord who quickeneth the 
dead revealed to him that righteousness which 1s 
of Christ by faith. But once he had inwardly 
beheld the perfectness of Christ and known it for 
his own, how he despised the image of his former 
pride, and how his own righteousness, that once 
had seemed so goodly a garment, came to appear a 
mere beggar’s clout, a foul and worthless thing, 
to be cast away for ever! ‘Thus did Paul find his 
way home; and thus did it please the Father to 
bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and 
rejoice over him. 


But we have already seen enough in our previous 
studies to know that we shall miss the whole secret 
of Paul’s own rejoicing if we forget that Paul wore 
Christ’s righteousness, not as an extraneous thing, 
but as something that was vitally his own. 

If we go back to Paul’s earliest days, we may 
safely conclude that there was one in Tarsus who 
through all those days imputed something to 
little Saul which went far beyond all his childish 
thought and understanding ; and that one was his 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 241 


mother. We may safely say that, in her own way, 
and from his earliest years, Saul’s mother was 
continually imputing righteousness to him. She 
watched him at play, and saw hints and gleams 
of what no one else ever saw or dreamed of seeing. 
She listened to his childish prattle, and heard in 
it what no one else ever heard or dreamed of 
hearing. She remembered his sayings, and pon- 
dered them in her heart; and when he would 
scribble little indecipherable epistles, as children 
will, and lay them in her lap, she would discern 
in them other and greater epistles which he was 
yet to write. She would bend over him asleep; 
and, in that stillness and sweet mystery of Heaven 
which hovers over the cot of every sleeping child, 
she would feel in her heart an occult touch and 
tremor, as from the wing of some angel of 
destiny. 

For, as we know, a mother’s sight is second- 
sight; it is insight and foresight. All mothers 
are at this holy work of imputing righteousness and 
all good and beautiful things. Our mothers see 
good in us which no one else sees; they clothe us 
in virtues beyond all actuality, and we live and 
move in their presence in the consciousness of 
that high investiture. And moreover it is possible, 
despite all the world’s unbelief, and the evidence 


of our failures, and the witness of our own con- 
Q 


242 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


demning hearts, that somehow our mothers—who 
are greater than our hearts—are right. What 
they have in-seen and foreseen concerning us may 
somehow be there, even though we can demon- 
strate that it is not there. It is our own best, 
unrealized selves; and we wear this love-woven 
garment of imputed righteousness wherewith they 
clothe us as a precious, sacred panoply against the 
world’s coarse disbelief and our own despairs. We 
wear it as a hope, a promise, a prophecy, of that 
most real, unrealized best. ‘There is indeed 
nothing more sacred, more wonderful, more holy 
than the way a mother will go on imputing right- 
eousness even to her most abandoned and scape- 
grace child. 

And so we must understand that when Paul 
came home to God and found in Him this atmo- 
sphere of imputed righteousness—found that God 
was beholding in him a goodness which was not 
his, even the very perfectness of His supreme Son 
—we must understand that the triumph of it all, 
if we may dare to put it so, was that God was 
right. God by imputing Christ’s righteousness 
to Paul was pledging it to him as something that 
should presently be actual and manifest in him. 
He was loving Paul out of the pit, even as Jesus 
had imputed righteousness to shifty, unstable 
Simon, and had loved him out of the pit. ‘“ Thou 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 243 
shalt be called Peter ”—‘*‘ Thou shalt be called 


Rock—my rock-man, my man of granite.” And 
there and then unsteadfast Simon put on his new 
great name for a robe of righteousness, woven out 
of the intercession and the grace of his Master ; 
and from that hour he knew, too, that his Master 
was right, and secretly, slowly, he began to take 
on the granite quality. 


Paul’s doctrine of imputed righteousness, then, 
is all of a piece with his conception of the Life of 
Christ—with his conception of the believing man’s 
living union with Christ. “I live; yet not I, 
but Christ liveth in me.”? Apart from that, Paul 
has no doctrine of any gift of righteousness what- 
soever. As spring lives in the buds and the 
swelling seed, as summer lives in the fruit and 
ripening grain, so Christ lived in Paul, not cancel- 
ling his selfhood, but bringing it into fruition. 
(For the self which Paul speaks of as a thing 
renounced and crucified is not that of his individual 
consciousness, but the self of his egoistic ambitions.) 
And because Christ lived in Paul, and because 
Christ’s virtue was hourly passing into Paul’s life, 
Christ’s perfect righteousness was Paul’s there and 
_ then to rejoice in before God. 


And, moreover, we may understand how this 


244 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 
directly helped forward the process of Paul’s 


actual spiritual development. 

In the sick-room it is our wisdom, whenever 
we reasonably may do so, to weave for the invalid 
thoughts of health, and to apparel him in those 
health-thoughts as in an electrical robe—a robe, 
so to say, of physiological righteousness: for, by 
so doing, we quicken his recovery. And so we 
may recognize that that imputation of Christ’s 
righteousness which was made to Paul was all the 
time communicating to him something of its own 
virtue, leading his thoughts from that plague of 
the heart which still vexed him, and which yields 
to no inward brooding, to that perfectness pledged 
to him in the living Christ. ‘Thus it was the glory 
of God in the face of Christ Jesus that was for 
Paul the healing vision which restored his soul; 
so that he might have said with the Psalmist : 
‘Thou art the health of my countenance and my 


God.” 


And then, once more, we may subject this 
doctrine of grace, also, to the test of its practical 
applications. 

Is it not written that, if we would prosper in 
the world, we must first learn the grammar of 
the world? Now part of the grammar of the 
world is this: that we should regard every man 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 245 


as a rogue until we have proved him honest. The 
grammar of the Law, however, 1s in this respect 
somewhat higher: for does not the Law regard 
every man as honest until it has proved him a 
rogue? But the grammar of Grace is highest. 
As much as in you lies, says Grace, regard a man 
as honest, even though you have found him a 
rogue. This is to be interpreted, not foolishly, 
but according to the sanity of faith. ‘That is to 
say, Grace would have us to impute righteous- 
ness, not simply recognizing the manifest good, but 
appealing to the goodness that is’ not discover- 
able, and reckoning to men a virtue beyond their 
attainment. Let runaway Onesimus be reckoned 
still worthy of the virtue of his name! “ He is 
profitable to thee and to me” (Philemon 11). Here 
is a reformatory principle of wide application, 
capable, it may be, of re-fashioning much that 
austere Law, far removed from any doctrine of 
Grace, has built into our present Criminal system. 

And is there no room for a liberal application 
of this Pauline doctrine among those who love us 
and whom we love? Sometimes romance dies all 
too soon. In our early, glamorous days did we 
idealize much, to be idealized much in return, 
and thus was there a strange shining about us, a 
sort of sweet extravagance and beautiful folly— 
not without its tender, reminiscent charm, it may 


246 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


be, for the elect among our elder folk? For so 
Love makes children of us again; and of such is 
the Kingdom of Heaven. But now we have put 
away childish things ; now we are more sober ; now 
we are aware of each other’s faults, and can point 
them out with accuracy and lucid analysis. Our 
love, we understand, is no longer fanciful ; and we 
like to think it may be all the better for that— 
more chastened, wiser, more patient. But if the 
glamour has faded, we have lost something rich 
and rare which we cannot afford to lose, and which, 
it may be, we have no need to lose. We ought to 
go on idealizing and being idealized. We should 
love each other, not alone for what we are, but for 
what we shall become. We should regard one 
another as arrayed in that beauty and perfectness 
which have now to be imputed, but which shall 
yet be brought forth and made fully manifest. 


So we have need to remember that this divine 
righteousness is cast over us always, sleeping and 
waking, living and dying, to be honoured in all our 
behaviour. If we will have it so, says the daring 
seer, we are one by faith with all the noble of the 
earth—Shakespeare’s mind and Lord Christ’s 
heart, they are for us. “ All things are yours,” 
Says a seer yet more daring; “‘ whether Paul, or 


Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, 


Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 247 


or things present, or things to come; all are yours ; 
and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.” If it 
is denied to us, it is because we are replete with 
ourselves—so “‘ replete with very thou” that we 
want for nothing, and need all. But for all who 
have lost conceit of themselves, and vehemently 
desire fellowship in a righteousness woven on a 
larger loom and to a grander pattern than theirs— 
for such, the message of Paul is that that Right- 
eousness is theirs in communion with all the poor 
in spirit who call on the name of the Lord. 


VItl 


THE CHRIST BEYOND THE AGES 


‘“’THEN cometh the end, when He shall have 
delivered up the kingship to God, even the Father : 
when He shall have put down all rule and all 
authority and power. For He must reign until 
He hath put all enemies under His feet. . . . And 
when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then 
shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him, 
that God may be all in all.” And if we inquire 
of Paul as to his authority for this so great and 
strange declaration, what answer can we expect 
but this: ‘I received of the Lord that which I 
delivered unto you”? Not otherwise can we 
account for this ‘‘ brave text,” this “‘ generous 
word,” * this saying that calls to us out of the 
excellent glory ere it loses itself in light. For 
Paul’s mind and spirit must press onward beyond 
all finite conceptions to the illimitable and eternal. 
After the Blessed Hope, what then? After the 
Complete Redemption, what then? After the 
putting down of all enmity, the death of Death, 


* See Emerson, Circles. 


248 


The Christ Beyond the Ages 249 


the final victory of Life and Love, what then? 
Paul must meditate upon this so intently and so 
prayerfully that presently, as with the Last Supper, 
so here, there comes to his fixed and brooding mind 
an “ opening,” and an in-shining of mystic light 
as from the presence of the Lord. So that Paul 
can say: ‘I received of the Lord that which also 
I delivered unto you, how that the Lord Jesus, 
when all things shall be subdued unto Him, shall 
take of His kingdom, having perfected it, and lay 
it at His Father’s feet ; likewise His own self also, 
and be for ever subject unto Him that hath put 
all things under Him; that God may be all in 
Alki 


I meanwhile who drew 
Near to the limit where all wishes end, 
The ardour of my wish .. . 
Ended within me 
* x * * x 


Already of myself aloft I looked ; 

For visual strength, refining more and more, 
Bare me into the ray authentical 

Of sovran light. ‘Thenceforward what I saw 
Was not for words to speak, nor memory’s self 
To stand against such outrage on her skill. 

As one who, from a dream awakened, straight 
All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains 
Impression of the feeling in his dream ; 

F’en such am I: for all the vision dies, 

As ’t were, away ; and yet the sense of sweet 
That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart. 
Thus in the sun-thaw is the snow unsealed. 

. .. O Eternal beam ! 


250 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


(Whose height what reach of mortal thought may soar ?) 
Yield me again some little particle 

Of what thou then appearedst; give my tongue 

Power, but to leave one sparkle of thy glory, 

Unto the race to come, that shall not lose 

Thy triumph wholly, if thou waken aught 

Of memory in me, and endure to hear 

The record sound in this unequal strain.* 


So Paul will proceed to show how the redemp- 
tive Life of Christ, begun in renunciation, must 
likewise be completed in the same. He will show 
how in the end Christ shall seek a new self-empty- 
ing, knowing no sweeter joy than the joy of that 
last uttermost self-oblation unto the glory of the 
One God, whose life is an eternal outpouring of 
His Godhead upon all His worlds. ‘‘ Then shall 
the Son also Himself be subject unto Him ”’; and 
for that joy that is set before Him, He who 
endured the Cross bears also the Crown, that at 
last “God may be all in all.” “ All in all”— 
not in the null and void beatitude of an oblivious 
Nirvana, but in the jubilee of a redeemed universe, 
wherein all shall say, “‘ God is all to us, and we 
are all to Him, and, in Him, to each other.”” Thus 
does Paul’s always unfinished Life of Christ reach 
its endless end: for beyond that not he nor any 
seer has ever seen; beyond it is the Light Un- 
approachable. 


* Dante: Paradise, xxxiii. 


The Christ Beyond the Ages 251 


And so, as we bring our study to a close, let us 
once more confess that such a Life of Christ as 
Paul has outlined for us may often leave us groping 
as fora lost clue. It may be, as we have said, that 
Truth—that Revelation—also hath its kenosis. 
It may be there are times when Revelation empties 
itself of something of its authority and strips itself 
of its august, regal certitudes, passing into im- 
poverishment for the deeper enrichment of our 
faith in days to come. Does it not seem to be so 
in this present age? ‘To-day the figure of Christ 
wears once more the peasant garb of the Teacher 
of Galilee. It is ‘‘ the historic Jesus ”’ that we see, 
the lover of God, the teacher of men, the critic of 
Church and State, the friend of the outcast and 
the oppressed—He, rather than the Lord of 
Glory. And if this be so with us, we must be true 
to ourselves, even to our limitations. Nothing 
could be less in keeping with the spirit of Truth 
than to attempt to force the faith of any genera- 
tion into affirmations that are not its own and are 
alien to its confidence. In yielding to such pres- 
sure men lose all contact with Truth’s authority, 
reflecting the reflections of others; in resisting it 
they are apt to react polemically toward a con- 
trary bias, and thus again to have their own angle 
of direct reflection disturbed. Organizations 
committed to certain fixed traditional forms must 


252 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


always have the right to exact an appropriate sub- 
mission of those who voluntarily serve them; 
hardly, however, in the name of Truth, but rather 
in the interests of an agreed rule and discipline. 
For Truth is of the Spirit; and even a correct 
form may be held not in Truth but in perjury. 
The divine quest and perpetual discovery must 
proceed through the Spirit of God and the 
instincts of the soul of man; and Faith, heeding 
the voices of the past and of the future also, must 
fashion its own certitudes from age to age. 

But the voices of the past must be heeded; 
for “ the past is never merely the past,”’ but holds 
for us something of the timeless treasure of God. 
The past is that divine scripture which is profit- 
able for teaching, for reproof, for instruction in 
righteousness, that the man of God, with present 
guidance and forevision, may be furnished com- 
pletely unto every good work. As for our Life of 
Christ—far different from Paul’s, it may be, is 
that Life which the modern mind in its present 
mood would write for us. It would celebrate, 
perhaps, the sublime genius of the Child of obscure 
Galilean origin, portraying His matchless and 
baffling personality, expounding and comparing 
His marvellous ethic, and concluding upon His 
inevitable and fruitful martyrdom and_ pos- 
thumous influence. But then does never Paul’s 


The Christ Beyond the Ages 208 


Christ return to trouble our dreams and haunt our 
hearts as with the sense of a lost music, a vanished 
glory? Shall not the most modern among us do 
well to recognize a certain background of mystery 
from which there may at any time emerge for 
him those august disclosures of majesty and great 
glory whose rumour still lingers around him from 
bygone ages of faith? Is there not always about 
Jesus Christ something beyond our conceiving? 
When we would define Him, do we not find that 
He has escaped us—that it is not He that our cun- 
ning definition has captured, but some too intel- 
ligible little Christ of our own? And do these so 
intelligible Christs completely satisfy us? Do 
they feed us in the wilderness, comfort us in the 
storm, ransom us out of our hells, wash us and 
make us white in their own blood? 

In the end shall we not find that there is no 
Christ in whom our hearts can rest but He who 
dwelleth in the bosom of the Father—the Christ 
of eternal grace and eternal redemption, who, 
supreme among the sons of men, hath died, the 
just for the unjust, that He might Brine us To 


Gop? 





ANNOTATIONS 





THE JERUSALEM WHICH IS ABOVE 


Tue crowning woe of Euripides’ Medea and 
Hecuba was that amid all their sorrows they 
were citiless, and therefore orphans of the world. 
A Frenchman might say of Paris, or an Italian 
of Rome, or a New Englander of Boston, or an 
Englishman of London, “she is the mother of 
us all.” Thus, for an Englishman, London is 
like no other city; it is not even like itself; it is 
the symbol and embodiment of something far 
more than itself. It was not otherwise with 
Saul of Tarsus and his Jerusalem, save that with 
him such loyalties struck deep into springs of 
mystic feeling hardly to be traced in the civic 
consciousness of modern patriotism. 

We understand that this power, varying in 
degree and in quality, but always notable, which 
great cities exercise Over us, is in manifest agree- 
ment with the genius of man. We are made for 
fellowship. Our consciousness of others is as 
fundamental as our consciousness of ourselves. 
‘The beaver does not construct its habitat more 
instinctively than man sets himself to fashion a 

R 257 


258 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


society. Not communion with Nature, not even 
communion with God, may take the place of 
human fellowship. Poetry, Science, Religion may 
enrich and transform society; they may not 
cancelit. ‘The solitaire wars against the universe, 
seeking an impossible peace; at best what he 
wins is benumbment. ‘To be inwardly quickened 
is to know oneself spiritually socialist. So in all 
civilized ages the highest aspirations and en- 
deavours of man have been toward a City. 

But let us repeat it:* the \reverencesongam 
Englishman for London or a Frenchman for 
Paris or even an Italian for Rome is hardly to 
be compared with the passion of an old-time 
Jew for Jerusalem. For him it was the Holy 
City, the centre and symbol of a living unity 
and a divine destiny; and in exile his heart 
turned to it as the heart of the saint turns to 
God.“ If I ;forget thee, O Jerusalemi eee 
So we shall not easily conceive the desolation 
of heart which came to Hebrew Christians, 
nurtured in boundless devotion to Zion, when 
it became plain to them that their city was 
apostate, that her initiative had passed from her, 
that her glory was departed. The heaven- 
piercing, awful cry which went up from the 
Jewish hosts when in the final hour of Titus’ 
attack they beheld the Temple itself whelmed 


Annotations 259 


at last in the general ruin—that cry was fore- 
echoed in their hearts who, years before, had 
learned the inner and spiritual truth. Jerusalem 
was already fallen, the Temple already forsaken. 

No living Jew could have felt it more than 
Paul; and when we find him in Galatians liken- 
ing Jerusalem in allegory to Hagar, the bond- 
woman, and not to Sarah, the mother of the 
free, we may know that the pen that indited 
the similitude was dipped in blood. “I could 
have wished myself anathema. .. .” 

Even now are we wholly without a clue to a 
sorrow so great, so consuming? Our hearts 
are hungry for the enduring Commonwealth, for 
the age of healing and of peace; but our civiliza- 
tion is still in thrall to evil interests, our cities 
profaned with defiling idolatries. London— 
Paris—Rome—Berlin—Vienna: these, too, have 
known the visitation of the Son of Man, and 
have made their tragic refusals, despising the 
things which belong unto peace. Is it a light 
thing for the generous, valiant heart of youth 
to-day to learn that these storied cities of our 
modern world, on which men’s dreams have so 
hopefully rested—that these cities have despised 
the glory that might have been theirs? 
When one thinks on these things, and the 
question forces itself upon us, ‘“ What ought 


260 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


believing men to do?” one turns again to Paul 
and to the believing men of old. 

The Jerusalem which is above, says Paul in a 
memorable passage, is free, and is the mother of 
us all. There is a similar declaration that be- 
longs to the seer of Patmos. And we may be 
glad that the Book of Revelation came to be 
included in our canon, if only for this—that it 
expands Paul’s own saying into a triumphant 
vision of that same Jerusalem which is above 
and is for ever free, and is the Mother City of 
all the pilgrims of faith. Moreover, it is good 
that we should remember that it was a vision 
beheld by a Hebrew seer after the old Jerusalem 
had passed in blood and fire and vapour of 
smoke. It was as if he had said: ‘“* The old 
Jerusalem is fallen; but that, after all, was the 
shadow-city; the true Jerusalem is on high, 
impregnable, in yonder unapparent realm of 
faith and hope and aspiration. There is our 
City; and she shall not only take us to herself— 
she shall betake herself to us: she shall be estab- 
lished here in the midst of the years.” John 
will see her as a bride, Paul as a mother, but it 
is the one City: and the point to be noted is, 
that here we have the victory of faith over dis- 
illusion, the song of the sons of the morning 
which challenges the night. And so, when the 


Annotations 261 


barbarians were sacking Rome, Augustine was 
writing his City of God. 

Is not true patriotism always pledged to in- 
tangible realities? Do not its loyalties always 
reach upward to invisible commonwealths? Was 
ever the Zion the prophets loved entirely a visible 
thing? The pride of Lebanon, the might of 
Jordan, the glory of Hermon—were even these 
altogether substantial and tangible, and not at 
all the reflex of some grace and beauty not of 
earth, the mirrored splendour of some heavenly 
counterpart? Was ever the Athens of Athenian 
devotion a city made with hands? ‘“ Fix your 
eyes,” says Pericles, “‘on what Athens might be, 
and make yourselves her lovers.” Lamennais, 
seeking beyond his nineteenth-century Rome and 
Paris for that Commonwealth whose call from 
afar had summoned him to pilgrimage, is presently 
(he tells us) “caught up, above the region of 
shadows,” until he is lost in the Source of all 
love and wisdom and power; “then,” says he, 
“I felt what Country is.” There must always, 
it seems, be a City which is above, or our hearts 
fail us. There must always be an Athens which 
might be, an unrealized New Jerusalem, an 
_ Eternal City more glorious than the Rome that 
is now, or ever has been. Our ‘‘ common states 
that stand in caution, twilight cities dimly wise ”’ 


262 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


can be truly served only by that Band of Lovers 
who behold them, not in their own light, but in 
the light of their heavenly counterpart and 
original. ‘The patriotism which moves only amid 
ephemeral facts, with no bond or covenant with 
ideal realities, must fail us in the important 
hour. It has no defence against the disenchant- 
ments of time, the tyranny of present fact, the 
assault of events: 

It is written of certain pilgrims that they 
looked for a City which hath foundations. And 
truly, if they had been mindful of that country 
from whence they came out, they might have 
had opportunity to have returned: but they 
desired a better country, that is, an heavenly; 
and not having received the promises, but having 
seen them afar off, they were persuaded of them 
and embraced them: wherefore, it is added, 
God is not ashamed to be called their God, for 
He hath prepared for them a City. That they 
should have sought a City “‘ which hath founda- 
tions’ is also, as we have already had occasion 
to observe, a characteristic of this higher patriot- 
ism. For we shall hardly be sustained upon a 
hope so ethereal that it dissolves into vain rhap- 
sody. But the “ Jerusalem which is above” is 
no phantom-city. ‘“ They stand, those halls of 
Zion.” Age by age they who for a while have 


Annotations 263 


worn, as we do now, the livery of mortality 
have passed thither and entered in. Shall we 
not believe that they love this earth with the 
love of the Son of Man, and that with Him they 
weave their ministries around us? ‘ There is 
still,” says Bishop Hall in his Christ Mystical, 
‘and ever will be, a secret and unfailing corre- 
spondence between heaven and earth”; and as 
for us, left here to tug with many difficulties, 
‘“we cannot forget that better half of us.” 
‘Where we are,” said Garibaldi, repeating an 
ancient word, “there is Rome.” Can we not 
say of the faithful now made wise with the 
wisdom of the immortal years and purified 
beyond stain, “ Where they are, there is our 
true Commonwealth ’?? Where Lincoln is, there 
is the true America. Where Lamennais is, there 
is the true France. Where Paul is, there is the 
true Jerusalem. Where Christ is, there is the 
Earth of the Redemption, the City of Man, the 
City of God. 


The heavens, as John Pulsford would say, are 
always seeking to come down. So we have need 
to set our hearts to the ancient, holy faith that 
the Divine City is waiting to descend to us. 
In the face of the contradictions of time and our 
own inconstancy, we might well despair, if all 


264 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


the seeking of better things were on this time- 
ward, mortal side. But, as it is said that a man’s 
vocation seeks him more truly than he seeks his 
vocation, so the seers would teach us that the 
Divine City, which bears in itself the vocation 
of mankind, yearns toward the world beyond all 
the world’s desire to attain to it. The Jerusalem 
which is above would not be the mother of us 
all, had she no mother-yearning to make her way 
to us, and the more so because of our distresses. 
But is she not ever descending? For her descent 
is into believing hearts, that from them she may 
be built up and made manifest at last upon the 
earth. ‘This must be our hope as we dwell in 
the Hagar cities which now are, and are in 
bondage. 

And Hagar too, and her children—are they 
not also beloved? For them even now is the 
well-spring in the wilderness; and when the 
Queen-Mother cometh, with Hagar it shall not 
be as of old, but she shall find favour and a new 
liberty, and repent her of her rebellion, and bring 
her glory and honour into the royal house, and 
be glad. 

“The poet has said: O Beloved City of 
Cecrops! Canst thou not say: O Beloved City 
of God? ” | 


Annotations | 265 


PAUL AS GOD’S PATRIOT 


In his Epistle to the Romans Paul asserts the 
inwardness of nationality as applied to his own 
race. He is not a Jew who is one outwardly ; 
but he is a Jew who is one inwardly (Rom. ii. 28). 
Nationality, that is to say, is not simply a fact, 
but a vocation. ‘Thus to be a Jew was to be an 
advantaged person, chiefly by reason of the 
historic revelation committed to the steward- 
ship of the Hebrew race. But Paul was not 
prepared to know a man as a Jew simply because 
he was of Jewish blood and had submitted to 
the rites of the Jewish faith. The question went 
deeper; the question was, whether or no he 
had a spiritual apprehension of his share in the 
national vocation, whether or no he had a heart 
sealed unto the holy covenant of God. “ Cir- 
cumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and 
not in the letter.” 

The statement may be taken as looking toward 
the truth that there is but one abiding patriot- 
ism—the patriotism of the spirit, and but one 
fatherland, the fatherland of the soul. The true 
children of Abraham are they who in all ages 
and in all lands have shared Abraham’s spiritual 
faith, and, like him, have reckoned themselves 


266 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


strangers and pilgrims upon the earth. But this 
may be so interpreted as to deny that patriotism 
and nationality as we know them have any place 
in the Providential ordering of the world; and 
though there are passages which seem to bear 
out that view, it is hardly to be accepted as the 
Pauline thought. Paul indeed has shown us that, 
when he came to know Jesus Christ as Lord, he 
learned that in Him the divisions of race and 
class which divided the world were abrogated. 
In Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek, bar- 
barian nor Scythian, slave nor freeman. But to 
take this declaration as a denial that any Provi- 
dential and spiritual function can pertain to racial 
or social groupings as such would be to have 
Paul deny also the place of sex and of family life 
in the Christian order. For Paul makes the same 
statement in respect of the sexes: in Christ there 
is neither male nor female. Yet nowhere do we 
find a more religious recognition of the spiritual 
value and sacredness of these relationships than 
in the Pauline writings. In general, then, we 
may understand that what he claims is that all 
such distinctions, without necessarily being can- 
celled, are transcended. In Christ, redeemed 
Humanity rises above all barriers that would 
divide it. All distinctions must be viewed in 
relation to the supreme unity in which they 


Annotations | 267 


meet; and any distinction incompatible with 
that unity must fall away. 

Thus it is a spiritual conception of Humanity 
and of the universe which supplies the perspective 
for Paul’s thought concerning all racial and social 
relationships. It 1s, of course, easy to read into 
the Pauline doctrine and outlook conceptions 
which belong to a far later orientation—easy to 
forget that the apostle’s thought was interwoven 
with an apocalyptic faith which has largely 
dropped out of mind; perhaps, also, it is easy, 
on the other hand, to assign to him limitations 
which were never his—easy, in our zeal for a 
historical realism of interpretation, to overlook 
the workings of religious genius. For does not 
inspired genius introduce the incalculable ele- 
ment? ‘* Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there 
is liberty.” 

But in any case we have the idea of Humanity 
as such—of what we should now speak of as the 
fundamental solidarity of the race—suggested in 
Paul’s discourse at Athens (Acts xvii.). In this 
discourse (which certain evangelical commen- 
tators are curiously pleased to depreciate, as if in 
this instance the apostle had spoken below the 
level of his inspiration) we are given in cameo 
form the Pauline philosophy of the world and of 


human history. Here, for instance, we have set 


268 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


forth: (1) The oneness of God, transcendent and 
immanent, the sole creative reality. He “ made 
the world and all things therein.” As the Trans- 
cendent One He “ dwelleth not in temples made 
with hands”; as the _ Immanent One, it is “ in 
Him ” that “we live and move and have our 
being.” (2) The spiritual origin of the universe, 
as having its source and sustenance in God. He 
“made the world”; ‘‘ He giveth to all life and 
breath and all things.” (3) The oneness and 
spiritual nature of Humanity. God hath made 
of one all nations of men; and all men are His 
offspring. (4) The recognition of nationhood as 
belonging to the Divine order. God is the 
Creator of nations. (5) The Divine Providence 
in ethnic development and national history. 
Ordaining mankind to dwell “on all the face of 
the earth,” God determined the “ appointed 
seasons °—the epochs of racial and national 
activity—and the boundaries of racial settlement 
\—“ the bounds of ” the nations’ “* habitation.” 
(6) The Divine vocation of all nations. The 
Providential purpose was that the nations were 
“to seek God,” even though it might be a half- 
blind and groping quest—“ if haply they might 
feel after Him and find Him, though He is not 
far from each one of us.” (7) The beginning 
of a new world-epoch with the coming of Christ. 


Annotations 269 


The nations had lived largely in spiritual ignor- 
ance, and those dark ages of ignorance God had 
overlooked; but now in Christ had dawned for 
mankind the age of enlightenment, and the light 
had brought with it a new responsibility. ‘There 
must be a renewing of the mind of the race. 
God “commandeth men that they should all 
everywhere repent.” (8) For the age of light 
brings with it an era of judgment. “ He” who 
‘determined the appointed seasons” of old 
“hath appointed a Day in which He will judge 
the world in righteousness.” (9g) The judgment 
which shall try all hearts and test all human 
standards centres in the Divine Humanity of 
Christ. God will judge the world “ by a Man 
whom He hath ordained.” (10) The assurance 
of this is the fact of the Living Christ, risen and 
exalted: “ whereof He hath given assurance unto 
all men, in that He hath raised Him from the 
dead.” 


So, to return, Paul would view the nations 
against the background of Humanity, and Human- 
ity against the background of a spiritual universe 
whose source is the One God of heaven and 
earth. God hath made of one all nations; and 
though the relationship is so myriad-fibred as to 
be past all conceiving, we are slowly learning that 


270 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


that aboriginal unity has gone on through the 
ages, weaving us all into a complex web from 
which no single life-thread may be disengaged. 
We may not number the foliaged mass on every 
bough of the giant oak that has been putting 
forth its branches through a hundred summers ; 
but we understand that every bough is related 
to every other, and that it is the same with 
each leaf in their multitudinous communion; we 
understand that together the branches are or- 
dained to serve the growth of the tree; that for 
each is the task of feeling after the light, for each 
the mission of transmuting the solar energies for 
the life of all. So God grows trees; so, accord- 
ing to Paul, He grows Humanity. Humanity 1s 
the oak, the nations are the branches, ordained 
to organize the life of Humanity, ordained to 
feel after and transmute the truth of God into 
human experience and service. As a tree that 
put forth leaves but no branches would be 
smothered in its own foliage, so Humanity with- 
out the organizing function of nationality would 
be an inert smother of individuals. It is difficult 
to see how the world could have progressed at all 
but for this organic grouping of the peoples: for 
in this way variety of type has been secured, and 
an intensive culture. Paul’s conception, in which 
the same creative and overruling power that 


Annotations 271 


kindled the stars and brought forth life ordained 
the nations also, is hardly to be traversed. 


Where we of the modern world have fallen 
behind Paul is in our understanding of the voca- 
tion and function of nationhood. It may well 
be that the great era of Nationality, as distinct 
from a banal nationalism, is stilltocome. ‘To-day, 
in ways more complex than in Paul’s time, 
organized self-interest subverts patriotism to its 
own ends, sundering the world into rival and 
jealous groups; a Mammonized nationalism be- 
comes an end in itself, and Humanity a rhetorical 
term without moral appeal. 

Yet in spite of the evil of the times, the highest 
conscience of mankind stands with Paul for a 
spiritual interpretation of the universe, for the 
oneness of the race, for the Divine vocation of 
the nations. That Humanity is upon earth for 
the worship and service of God in the develop- 
ment of the world; that to the nations belongs 
the mission of co-operating to that same end; 
that to each nation it is given in its own way to 
“* feel God in life,” and make its own contribution 
to the exploration of Divine Reality—no faith 
with any serious claim to be a world-religion 
could now refuse obeisance to these conceptions. 
Even the Pauline declaration as to the Providen- 


272 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


tial ordering of the national frontiers has strangely 
survived long ages of imperial conquest, the 
cynicism of predatory alliances, and the jobbery 
of recurring eras of “‘ reconstruction.” 

Above all, and more and more, it becomes 
plain that Paul’s proclamation of a new world- 
era, whose creative word is the revelation in 
Jesus Christ, was no fantasy of fanatic faith, but 
prophetic truth. If history has confirmed any 
moral and spiritual conception, it has confirmed 
the declaration that in Jesus Christ God has 
spoken a new word to the race, calling all men 
everywhere to repent. The sign of the Son of 
Man is in the moral firmament of the world. 
The truth as it is in Jesus becomes more and more 
surely the common standard by which the con- 
science of mankind makes and tests its appraise- 
ments. In the spiritual commerce of the nations, 
the currency which remains firm amid the shocks 
and moral bankruptcies of the times is that which 
bears the authentic image and superscription of 
Christ. It is in Him that the world is feeling 
toward spiritual unity. 

The small boy with a “‘ jig-sawed”’ map of 
the two hemispheres to piece together begins to 
recognize that the task of reconstructing a jumbled 
world is not easy. But in a happy moment he 
turns his pieces over, to find that the picture- 


Annotations 272 


scheme on the reverse side is that of a man. 
That picture, too, has to be put together; but 
the task is more appealing, and the work is pre- 
sently done. ‘Then once more the set is turned 
over, and, behold, a reconstructed world—every 
country in its place, “ part fitly joined to part by 
that which every joint supplieth.” So it is that 
in the Man of God’s appointing we have the clue 
by which every nation may be built into the 
spiritual unity of a redeemed Humanity—“ grow- 
ing up,” as Paul puts it, “ into Him.” 


The creative and Providential sovereignty of 
God, the spirituality of the universe, the oneness 
of mankind, the Divine vocation of the nations 
in the spiritual service of the world, the redemp- 
tive revelation in Christ as the basis upon which 
the mind of man must be remade, the soul of 
the peoples quickened unto a living unity—this 
is the faith which, though rejected of the general 
will, is witnessed to already by the conscience of 
the peoples. We await a new Age of Faith, in 
which, in the power of these conceptions, patriot- 
ism shall be re-born and dedicated to the crusade 
of the Divine Commonwealth. For lack of it 
the world is still tormented, seeking peace and 
finding none; and righteous authority is lost 


amid a tumult of conflicting interests. “Thomas 
S 


274. St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


Hughes writes to Charles Kingsley during the 
Crimean War, and draws a fervid comparison 
between the British forces in the field and Crom- 
well’s Ironsides. But Kingsley will not have it 
so. Individual faith, he replies, will be found in 
those trenches before Sebastopol, even such 
private belief as gives men fortitude amid personal 
perils and hardships; but no great national faith 
will be discoverable, no covenanting sense of 
God and His sovereign purposes for England and 
for mankind; and Cromwell’s men may be sup- 
posed in their own grim fashion to have had 
something of that. Was not Kingsley right? 
For lack of such a faith as beholds Humanity in 
the light of the living God and interprets nation- 
hood as sealed with the blood of the New Cove- 
nant, we are fallen into distempers and moral 
lassitude. It may be that we have need to return 
to the Pauline emphasis. ‘“‘ He is not a Jew who 
is one outwardly”; nor, by the same token, is 
he an Englishman or an American or an Italian 
or a German who is one outwardly. That a 
man should be of English blood and English 
birth, that he should lie in English, loaf in English, 
and in English generally evade his obligations, 
does not, according to the Pauline showing, make 
him an Englishman. But he is an Englishman 
who is one inwardly. He understands what 


Annotations 275 


nationhood means who has learned (as Paul 
learned, in the school of the living Christ) that 
its seal and passport are of the heart, in the spirit. 
He is high-born who is born into that faith—for 
whom the very name Humanity is woven of 
prophecies of the Holy Commonwealth that is 
to be—for whom the name of Country and 
Fatherland chimes like the bells of the sanctuary, 
calling to worship and to service. 


“| say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my con- 
science bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, 
that I have great heaviness and continued sorrow 
in my heart. For I could wish that I myself 
were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s 
sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh... . 
Brethren, my heart’s desire and my supplication 
to God is for them, that they may be saved.” 
So speaks God’s patriot. And he will not give 
them up. He must go out into the darkness, 
and wrestle like Jacob until break of day. 
Throughout the closing chapters of the Epistle 
to the Romans we overhear as it were the gasps 
of this mighty wrestler. ‘“‘ Hath God cast away 
His people? God forbid! God hath not cast 
away His people which He foreknew ! ”—‘“‘ By 
their unbelief they were broken off . . . and if 
they continue not in their unbelief, they shall 


276 St. Pauls Life of Christ 


be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in 
again.” —“ Have they stumbled, that they should 
fall? God forbid! but rather through their fall 
salvation is come unto the Gentiles. . . . Now if 
the fall of them be the riches of the world, and 
their loss the riches of the Gentiles, how much 
more their fulness? . . . For if the casting away 
of them is the reconciling of the world, what shall 
the receiving of them be...?” And thus 
upon this Wresthng Jacob dawn breaks at last.— 
‘“ AND so ALL IsRAEL SHALL BE SAVED. ... For 
God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that He 
might have mercy upon all. O the depths of 
the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge 
of God! ... For of Him, and through Him, 
and unto Him, are all things. To Him be the 
glory for ever!” 

Such is the inwardness of the true patriotism : 
a passion and an agony, triumphing through to 
invincible, divine hope; a world-vision and dedi- 
cation, with a Cross for its centre and summit, 
and beyond it the Great Dawn. 


THE SAINTS TO JUDGE THE WORLD 


““ Know ye not,” says Paul to his unruly and 
troublesome Corinthians, “ that the saints shall 
judge the world? ” (1 Cor. vi. 2). He puts the 


Annotations 277 


question rhetorically, as if they should have known 
it from the first; but if they did, they gave little 
sign of it. ‘This, indeed, was Paul’s implied con- 
tention. They were giving all too little sign of 
it. It would appear that some of the brethren 
were in danger of reversing the true order, calling 
in the world to judge the saints. 

Paul goes on to declare that the saints are to 
judge angels also; and, as we have seen in our 
foregoing studies, it is an indication of the change 
which has been wrought since Paul’s time in our 
mental dialect that this saying comes to us now 
as if in an unknown tongue. Fortunately, per- 
haps, we are not here committed to any discussion 
of the management of angels; it is enough that 
we should confine ourselves to this other saying, 
that the saints are to judge the world—to direct 
the affairs of the earth. 

Perhaps the thought is still a little unfamiliar 
and challenging. At one time and another the 
notion has been entertained that the world is 
somewhat beneath the serious attention of the 
illuminated ; and there is the commoner opinion 
that the saints themselves are the wrong kind of 
people for the task. Neither of these objections 
finds support in Paul. 


For one thing, it seems clear that in Paul’s 


278 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


view the world was worth managing. And it does 
indeed appear that it was made to be managed. 
‘“‘Who is to manage it?” continues to be the 
problem of human society; and around the 
various answers to that question we may write 
the entire history of civilization. ‘The Pharaohs, 
the Assyrian War-Lords, the Cesars, the Popes, 
have all made their bid for it. To-day Democ- 
racy is the highest bidder. ‘To-morrow it shall 
be—what? We may continue to hope it will 
still be Democracy; but, upon any understanding 
of the case, the subject may hardly be dismissed 
as of no moment for religion. In his Epistle to 
the Romans Paul has a celebrated passage ideal- 
izing civil government as the ordinance of God 
(Rom. xiii.). However we may interpret that 
passage, it is clear that the whole subject of the 
direction of earthly affairs was one for which 
Paul had a spiritual concern. He understood, as 
our Puritan fathers understood, that here, no 
less than in other worlds, is the proper sphere for 
sovereign righteousness. Even when he is most 
manifestly in thrall to the expectation of imminent, 
heaven-rending cataclysm, he is worlds away from 
the mood of exalted indifference to this earth 
and its affairs. ‘The world of the Divine incarna- 
tion and redemption; the world in which the 
saints were being proved, and in which the 


Annotations 279 


mystery of iniquity was working; the world 
which should shortly echo to the trumpet of 
God, summoning the dead from their graves— 
such a world was at least not to be held in 
contempt as unworthy the attention of the 
illuminated. 

And then, as to the saints being the wrong 
kind of people for the undertaking, it is worth 
inquiring what is meant by the saints. Who 
are they? Ill-informed and fanatical visionaries? 
Hectoring folk, much given to repenting of other 
people’s sins? Or, perchance, Newman’s pale 
pietists, fleeing the common ways of men—his 
“humble monk and holy nun who... have 
calm faces and sweet, plaintive voices and spare 
frames and gentle manners”’? Or the just men 
of the earth who need no repentance—the proud 
and privileged aristocracy of virtue? According 
to Paul, the saints, whatever their individual 
characteristics, and whatever their variety of type, 
are in the main very human folk, who have come 
into a new experience of Divine reality, a new and 
joyous spiritual allegiance, and a certain liberating 
disillusionment. ‘They are such as ‘‘ worship God 
in the spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no 
confidence in the flesh.” ‘The saints are they 
who are awake in a somnolent world, the sons of 
the morning, the children of light. They are the 


280 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


pioneers of the new order, the fore-types of the 
new Humanity. They differ from the men of 
the old order, not because they are remote from 
the world, but because (since the earth cannot 
be completely seen from its own level) they have 
a clearer discernment of its meaning, and because 
they bring to it new values, new motives, the 
passion and power of a new life. They are not 
paragons; they have by no means arrived; but 
they have heard a call which summons ther toa 
new warfare with themselves and with the evil 
that surrounds them. Spirituality, according to 
Paul, is the “ pneumatic ” quality; and if in our 
drab, commercial age that word has for its main 
suggestion the accessories of the workshop and 
garage, even that grotesque suggestion is illus- 
trative. For spirituality does not take a man’s 
life off the common road, but enables him to 
take the road in better style, imparting a new 
resiliency. ‘The difference, in short, between the 
men of the old order and the men of the new is 
something subtle, impalpable—a breath, a spirit. 
It is like the difference between the technique of 
the executant who relies upon a mechanical 
accomplishment and the touch of the maestro 
who, using the same instrument, distils music 
from some viewless world of his own inspiration. 
But the difference, being impalpable, is none the 


Annotations 281 


less vital; for, with the saint, the Breath, the 
Spirit, is of God Himself. 


Bearing all this in mind, and coming to the 
management or mismanagement of the world as 
we have it in these times, it is clear, at least, that 
Paul’s contention is of some relevance. 

It seems that in these last cycles we have lost 
some heady illusions, and are by so much sobered 
and mentally clarified. The French Revolution, 
for instance, was a yeasty brew which at one time 
threatened to turn the heads of the very elect. 
It was not, it seemed, the saints who should judge 
the earth, but the natural man, of the earth most 
defiantly earthy. Back to Nature and on to the 
Rights of Man and forward to the Social Con- 
tract! ‘The formula was enchanting; and Man 
stood forth godlike in his reasoned self-sufficiency. 


O times 
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 
Of custom, law and statute took at once 
The attraction of a country in romance! 
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights 
When most intent on making of herself 
A prime enchantress . . 
* * 2 2 x 


Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth 
The beauty wore of promise. . . . 


If ever Paul’s ‘“‘ natural man’ could have 


282 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


fashioned Paradise from a formula, the Encyclo- 
pedists would have done it. But the dream 
passed. 

Since that time we have had our Homeric 748, 
and many another hour, more recent still, when 
the earth has seemed plastic to the hand of man, 
and great formule have been with him to seal 
the world for a better Eden. But at the crucial 
point they have all failed; and Adam remains 
unparadised. Even our most blessed formula of 
government of the people, for the people and by 
the people cannot completely avail for Adam; 
for it throws him back upon himself, which is 
always the one problem that defeats him. It 
must always defeat him, unless and until some- 
thing happens to Adam—until he is breathed 
upon with a new breath of life. 


Evermore we who believe in Democracy are 
being driven to the issue, Which Democracy? 
‘A people ruling,” exclaims Herodotus’ Athenian 
— ‘the very name ‘of it is beautiful!” -“ An 
acknowledged insanity,” says a later Athenian of 
the same thing. But Democracy as such is 
neither beautiful nor mad; it is a potentiality. 
And do there not emerge at length two radically 
different types—the Democracy of the flesh and 
the Democracy of the spirit ? 


Annotations 283 


_ 


If the world is to come finally under the 
direction of that Democracy which lives for, and 
by, bread alone, shall we be content? If there 
is to be no scripture nor history but what shall 
be of economic interpretation, no knowledge but 
what comes of comparing material things with 
material, shall we attain at last to the perfect 
wisdom and prosper? Will even our bread be 
reasonably secure? Our hope is in an order of a 
different sort—a Democracy which is not merely 
an organization, but a communion. Our hope is 
not in a calculated contract, contrived out of a 
cunning adjustment of temporal interests, but in 
a Covenant whose ordinances rest upon eternal 
sanctions, and are written of the Spirit in the 
hearts of the peoples. Apart from this we cannot 
look for any enduring commonwealth which shall 
evoke those mystic loyalties of the soul, without 
which sacrifice has no motive and martyrdom no 
meaning. And without these resources of the 
spirit, the State is defenceless against the chances 
and changes of fortune, and must slowly corrupt 
itself with lying demagoguery, or, more swiftly, 
with terrorism and violence. We are coming to 
see that the stability of States belongs in the last 
resort to the soul of the people, and to those 
unapparent forces which are regnant in the region 
of the spirit—belongs, that is to say, to an invisible 


284. St. Paul's Life of Christ 


kingdom, which is righteousness and peace and 
joy in the Holy Ghost. 

And if this is true, if we are to look for an 
order which shall establish a spiritual conscience 
over the whole area of human affairs, labouring 
for man, not because he is a short-lived animal 
with an appetite for happiness, but because he is 
a pilgrim of eternity, and holding the earth sacred 
not as man’s only possible Paradise, but as an 
appointed stage in his probation and education— 
if this is true, then the future, as Paul says, is 
with the saints. 


Even now it is the saints of Humanity, and 
not its magnates and Cesars, who do judge, and 
always have judged, the world. 

When we read in St. John that Jesus at the 
close of His earthly life declared that the world 
had been judged, and that in time to come the 
Divine Spirit would work in men the conviction 
of that judgment, we understand the saying to be 
demonstrably true. Those things which Jesus 
criticized and condemned have remained con- 
demned; and those things which won His 
approval are more and more claiming the homage 
of the race. And so with the saints, who have 
reflected His mind. ‘They have brought to bear 
upon the world those standards of judgment 


Annotations 285 


which have irresistibly asserted themselves against 
the organized prejudices and passions of their 
age. 

Newman in his Historical Sketches has a classic 
passage on the spiritual conflict of the saints. 
‘“ Punctual in its movements, precise in its opera- 
tions, imposing in its equipments, with its haughty 
clarion and its black artillery, behold the mighty 
world is gone forth to war—with what? With 
an unknown something which it feels but cannot 
see; Which flits around it, which flaps against 
its cheek; with the air, with the wind.: It 
charges and it slashes, and it fires its volleys, and 
it bayonets, and it is mocked by a foe who dwells 
in another sphere, and is far beyond the force 
of its analysis, or the capacities of its calculus. 
The air gives way, and it returns again; it exerts 
a gentle but constant pressure on every side; 
moreover, it is of vital necessity to the very 
power which is attacking it.” If it is true that 
Newman was content to find his illustration in 
the flight of Pio Nono to Gaeta and his return 
(after the cannon of the French had done their 
convenient work) to say Mass over the tomb of 
the Apostles, while we are disposed to seek it in 
some of those dreamers of the world whom Pope 
Pius and his like, princes spiritual and temporal, 
were not always inclined to favour—if this is true, 


286 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 


yet Newman’s underlying contention is none the 
less valid. It was John Huss in his Constance 
prison, not Pope John on the throne, Savonarola 
and not Lorenzo, John Bunyan and not the 
authorities that arraigned him, John Woolman 
and not the Virginian planters, Lamennais and 
not Louis Philippe and his masters, Rathenau 
and not Stinnes, who were and are the real judges 
of their age. ‘The world has always been at a 
loss to vanquish-a power which is “ beyond the 
force of its analysis or the capacities of its 
calculus.” 

Moreover, the judgment of the saints is never 
barren criticism—the imposition of an external 
criterion—but is always regenerative—the declara- 
tion of quickening, creative truth. And when at 
last, through the purgation of faith and repent- 
ance, the peoples shall attain to the illumination 
and empowerments of their apostles—in that Day 
of the Lord the world shall indeed be savingly 
judged, and the enduring Commonwealth estab- 
lished on the earth. 


We may note in conclusion that all Paul’s 
hopes for the saints and for the right order- 
ing of the earth were bound up with his 
faith in the supreme initiative and activity of 
Heaven. 


Annotations 287 


It is indeed little that we can do, Our infirm 
purposes, our shaken hopes, our activities limited 
alike by the medium we have to work upon and 
by our own defects—these may seem at times a 
wholly worthless contribution to offer. Yet if 
we believe in a spiritual world intersphering 
our earth, a world in which Christ bears at 
His girdle the keys of all authority, and in 
which “‘ the last wish of the martyr, the silent, 
unheard belief of the fettered prisoner,” are 
realities which count with God and are potent 
for the uplift of men—then we shall not 
despair. 

It was this certainty of Paul’s which sustained 
him. He had no thought of things drifting 
aimlessly toward some indefinite conclusion. To 
him it was clear that spiritual energies were 
massing in the unseen, and that Christ was in- 
visibly at work, preparing the consummations of 
history and of time. It was this hourly faith of 
Paul’s that back of all his journeyings and preach- 
ings and organizings and buffetings of Satan, and 
back of all that could be done and suffered by all 
the faithful of the earth, were the sure and 
sovereign ministries of Heaven—it was this faith 
that nerved him for the conflict against all the 
contradiction of the world. For him the supreme 
initiative lay, not with Jerusalem nor Antioch nor 


288 St. Paul's Life of Christ 


Rome, but with that most free and glorious 
“¢ Jerusalem which is above ”—the Mother City 


of the soul. 
And less than this we, also, dare not believe, 


if we are to endure. 


rs ¥ 
i y 
a My we iy 


an Wy) i ' 


Ne Nes mali 


Heb. 





Se all 


Wibieansstticaniac RH 









Date Due . 
) m4 


on 








LD PARR AO 











BS2651 .G85 
St. Paul’s life of Christ, 


cal Seminary—Speer Library 


| tu Vin | 


1 101e 00013 845 





